Francis Bacon Quotes
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It is not possible to run a course aright when the goal itself has not been rightly placed.
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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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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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That which above all other yields the sweetest smell in the air is the violet.
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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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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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Let great authors have their due, as time, which is the author of authors, be not deprived of his due, which is, further and further to discover truth.
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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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Half of science is putting forth the right questions.
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No pleasure is comparable to the standing upon the vantage-ground of truth.
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Boldness is a child of ignorance.
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The inclination to goodness is imprinted deeply in the nature of man.
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The human understanding is moved by those things most which strike and enter the mind simultaneously and suddenly, and so fill the imagination; and then it feigns and supposes all other things to be somehow, though it cannot see how, similar to those few things by which it is surrounded.
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A bachelor's life is a fine breakfast, a flat lunch, and a miserable dinner.
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If vices were profitable, the virtuous man would be the sinner.
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For it is not possible to join serpentine wisdom with columbine innocence, except men know exactly all the conditions of the serpent: his baseness and going upon his belly, his volubility and lubricity, his envy and sting, and the rest; that is, all forms and natures of evil: for without this, virtue lieth open and unfenced.
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The wonder of a single snowflake outweighs the wisdom of a million meteorologists.
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I've had photographs taken for portraits because I very much prefer working from the photographs than from models... I couldn't attempt to do a portrait from photographs of somebody I didn't know.
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Lucid intervals and happy pauses.
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Religion brought forth riches, and the daughter devoured the mother.
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Before I start painting I have a slightly ambiguous feeling: happiness is a special excitement because unhappiness is always possible a moment later.
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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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The sun, though it passes through dirty places, yet remains as pure as before.
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For knowledge, too, is itself power.