Francis Bacon Quotes
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Life, an age to the miserable, and a moment to the happy.
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If vices were profitable, the virtuous man would be the sinner.
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So ambitious men, if they find the way open for their rising, and still get forward, they are rather busy than dangerous; but if they be checked in their desires, they become secretly discontent, and look upon men and matters with an evil eye, and are best pleased, when things go backward.
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A good name is like precious ointment ; it filleth all round about, and will not easily away; for the odors of ointments are more durable than those of flowers.
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There is no doubt but men of genius and leisure may carry our method to greater perfection, but, having had long experience, we have found none equal to it for the commodiousness it affords in working with the Understanding.
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The fortune which nobody sees makes a person happy and unenvied.
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Friendship increases in visiting friends, but in visiting them seldom.
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The human understanding when it has once adopted an opinion (either as being the received opinion or as being agreeable to itself) draws all things else to support and agree with it.
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Houses are built to live in, and not to look on: therefore let use be preferred before uniformity.
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It is a great happiness when men's professions and their inclinations accord.
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Revenge is a kind of wild justice, which the more a man's nature runs to, the more ought law to weed it out.
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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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...to invent is to discover that we know not, and not to recover or resummon that which we already know.
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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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A prudent question is one-half of wisdom.
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When a man laughs at his troubles he loses a great many friends. They never forgive the loss of their prerogative.
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If the hill will not come to Mahomet, Mahomet will go to the hill.
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In things that a man would not be seen in himself, it is a point of cunning to borrow the name of the world; as to say, 'The world says,' or 'There is a speech abroad.'
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Envy is ever joined with the comparing of a man's self; and where there is no comparison, no envy.
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It is as hard and severe a thing to be a true politician as to be truly moral.
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Ipsa scientia potestas est. (Knowledge itself is power.)
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The surest way to prevent seditions...is to take away the matter of them.
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Imagination was given to man to compensate him for what he is not; a sense of humor to console him for what he is.
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Since my logic aims to teach and instruct the understanding, not that it may with the slender tendrils of the mind snatch at and lay hold of abstract notions (as the common logic does), but that it may in very truth dissect nature, and discover the virtues and actions of bodies, with their laws as determined in matter; so that this science flows not merely from the nature of the mind, but also from the nature of things.