Francis Bacon Quotes
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Certainly virtue is like precious odors, most fragrant when they are incensed, or crushed: for prosperity doth best discover vice, but adversity doth best discover virtue.
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Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested.
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To say that a man lieth, is as much to say, as that he is brave towards God, and a coward towards men.
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Great art is always a way of concentrating, reinventing what is called fact, what we know of our existence- a reconcentration… tearing away the veils, the attitudes people acquire of their time and earlier time. Really good artists tear down those veils.
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When you wander, as you often delight to do, you wander indeed, and give never such satisfaction as the curious time requires. This is not caused by any natural defect, but first for want of election, when you, having a large and fruitful mind, should not so much labour what to speak as to find what to leave unspoken. Rich soils are often to be weeded.
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No pleasure is comparable to the standing upon the vantage-ground of truth.
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For knowledge, too, is itself power.
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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 poets did well to conjoin music and medicine, in Apollo, because the office of medicine is but to tune the curious harp of man's body and reduce it to harmony.
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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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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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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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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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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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If the hill will not come to Mahomet, Mahomet will go to the hill.
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The pencil of the Holy Ghost hath labored more in describing the afflictions of Job than the felicities of Solomon.
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Boldness is a child of ignorance.
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Of all virtues and dignities of the mind, goodness is the greatest.
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The best preservative to keep the mind in health is the faithful admonition of a friend.
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To seek to extinguish anger utterly, is but a bravery of the Stoics. We have better oracles: Be angry, but sin not. Let not the sun go down upon your anger. Anger must be limited and confined, both in race and in time.
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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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Judges ought to be more learned, than witty, more reverend, than plausible, and more advised, than confident. Above all things, integrity is their portion and proper virtue.
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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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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.