Francis Bacon Quotes
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Nature is often hidden, sometimes overcome, seldom extinguished.
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Time is the greatest innovator.
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A man that hath no virtue in himself, ever envieth virtue in others. For men's minds, will either feed upon their own good, or upon others' evil; and who wanteth the one, will prey upon the other; and whoso is out of hope, to attain to another's virtue, will seek to come at even hand, by depressing another's fortune.
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There were taken apples, and ... closed up in wax. ... After a month's space, the apple inclosed in was was as green and fresh as the first putting in, and the kernals continued white. The cause is, for that all exclusion of open air, which is ever predatory, maintaineth the body in its first freshness and moisture.
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God Almighty first planted a garden. And indeed, it is the purest of human pleasures.
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Wise sayings are not only for ornament, but for action and business, having a point or edge, whereby knots in business are pierced and discovered.
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It would be an unsound fancy and self-contradictory to expect that things which have never yet been done can be done except by means which have never yet been tried.
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Seek ye first the good things of the mind, and the rest will either be supplied or its loss will not be felt.
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No pleasure is comparable to the standing upon the vantage-ground of truth.
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And because the breath of flowers is far sweeter in the air (where it comes and goes, like the warbling of music) than in the hand, therefore nothing is more fit for that delight than to know what be the flowers and plants that do best perfume the air.
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Cosmus, Duke of Florence, was wont to say of perfidious friends, that 'We read that we ought to forgive our enemies; but we do not read that we ought to forgive our friends.'
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Reading maketh a full man.
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An artist must learn to be nourished by his passions and by his despairs.
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If you want to convey fact, this can only ever be done through a form of distortion. You must distort to transform what is called appearance into image.
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Learning hath his infancy, when it is but beginning and almost childish; then his youth, when it is luxuriant and juvenile; then his strength of years, when it is solid and reduced; and lastly his old age, when it waxeth dry and exhaust.
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The End of our Foundation is the knowledge of Causes; and secret motions of things; and the enlarging of the bounds of Human Empire, to the effecting of all things possible.
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An illustrational form tells you through the intelligence immediately what the form is about, whereas a non-illustrational form works first upon sensation and then slowly leaks back into the fact.
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Opportunity makes a thief.
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Knowledge, that tendeth but to satisfaction, is but as a courtesan, which is for pleasure, and not for fruit or generation.
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If a man will begin with certainties, he shall end in doubts, but if he will content to begin with doubts, he shall end in certainties.
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Of all virtues and dignities of the mind, goodness is the greatest, being the character of the Deity; and without it, man is a busy, mischievous, wretched thing.
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Science is but an image of the truth.
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The obliteration of the evil hath been practised by two means, some kind of redemption or expiation of that which is past, and an inception or account de novo for the time to come. But this part seemeth sacred and religious, and justly; for all good moral philosophy (as was said) is but a handmaid to religion.
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He that defers his charity 'till he is dead, is (if a man weighs it rightly) rather liberal of another man's, than of his own.