Francis Bacon Quotes
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Truth is the daughter of time, not of authority.
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The desire of power in excess caused the angels to fall; the desire of knowledge in excess caused man to fall: but in charity there is no excess; neither can angel nor man come in danger by it.
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Men on their side must force themselves for a while to lay their notions by and begin to familiarize themselves with facts.
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Life, an age to the miserable, and a moment to the happy.
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Ipsa scientia potestas est. (Knowledge itself is power.)
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I should have been, I don't know, a con-man, a robber or a prostitute. But it was vanity that made me choose painting, vanity and chance.
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Men are rather beholden ... generally to chance or anything else, than to logic, for the invention of arts and sciences.
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Religion brought forth riches, and the daughter devoured the mother.
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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.
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A prudent question is one-half of wisdom.
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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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For all knowledge and wonder (which is the seed of knowledge) is an impression of pleasure in itself.
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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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For knowledge, too, is itself power.
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Boldness is a child of ignorance.
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But we may go further, and affirm most truly, that it is a mere and miserable solitude to want true friends; without which the world is but a wilderness.
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Certainly man is of kin to the beasts by his body; and if he be not kin to God by his spirit, he is a base and ignoble creature.
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Vices of the time; vices of the man.
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Half of science is putting forth the right questions.
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The great atheists, indeed are hypocrites; which are ever handling holy things, but without feeling; so as they must needs be cauterized in the end.
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We only have our nervous system to paint.
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In revenge a man is but even with his enemy; for it is a princely thing to pardon, and Solomon saith it is the glory of a man to pass over a transgression.
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There was a young man in Rome that was very like Augustus Caesar; Augustus took knowledge of it and sent for the man, and asked him "Was your mother never at Rome?" He answered "No Sir; but my father was."
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It is as hard and severe a thing to be a true politician as to be truly moral.