Francis Bacon Quotes
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Such philosophy as shall not vanish in the fume of subtile, sublime, or delectable speculation but shall be operative to the endowment and betterment of man's life.
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Nothing doth so much keep men out of the Church, and drive men out of the Church, as breach of unity.
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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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As the births of living creatures are at first ill-shapen, so are all innovations, which are the births of time.
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In nature things move violently to their place, and calmly in their place.
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For my name and memory I leave to men's charitable speeches, and to foreign nations and the next ages.
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Ipsa scientia potestas est. (Knowledge itself is power.)
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There is no such flatterer as is a man's self.
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There is a great difference between the Idols of the human mind and the Ideas of the divine. That is to say, between certain empty dogmas, and the true signatures and marks set upon the works of creation as they are found in nature.
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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 human understanding is of its own nature prone to suppose the existence of more order and regularity in the world than it finds. And though there be many things in nature which are singular and unmatched, yet it devises for them parallels and conjugates and relatives which do not exist. Hence the fiction that all celestial bodies move in perfect circles, spirals and dragons being (except in name) utterly rejected.
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He that hath knowledge spareth his words.
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For what a man would like to be true, that he more readily believes.
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But by far the greatest hindrance and aberration of the human understanding proceeds from the dullness, incompetency, and deceptions of the senses; in that things which strike the sense outweigh things which do not immediately strike it, though they be more important. Hence it is that speculation commonly ceases where sight ceases; insomuch that of things invisible there is little or no observation.
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If there be fuel prepared, it is hard to tell whence the spark shall come that shall set it on fire.
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One always starts work with the subject, no matter how tenuous it is, and one constructs an artificial structure by which one can trap the reality of the subject-matter that one has started from.
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The surest way to prevent seditions...is to take away the matter of them.
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Sacred and inspired divinity, the sabaoth and port of all men's labours and peregrinations.
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Even within the most beautiful landscape, in the trees, under the leaves the insects are eating each other; violence is a part of life.
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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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The quarrels and divisions about religion were evils unknown to the heathen. The reason was because the religion of the heathen consisted rather in rites and ceremonies than in any constant belief.
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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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Nature is often hidden, sometimes overcome, seldom extinguished.
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It's not what we eat but what we digest that makes us strong; not what we gain but what we save that makes us rich; not what we read but what we remember that makes us learned; and not what we profess but what we practice that gives us integrity.