Francis Bacon Quotes
-
If a man will begin with certainties, he shall end in doubts, but if he will content to begin with doubts, he shall end in certainties.
-
In all negotiations of difficulty, a man may not look to sow and reap at once; but must prepare business, and so ripen it by degrees.
-
Revenge is a kind of wild justice.
-
Painting is the pattern of one's own nervous system being projected on canvas.
-
Great art is deeply ordered. Even if within the order there may be enormously instinctive and accidental things, nevertheless they come out of a desire for ordering and for returning fact onto the nervous system in a more violent way.
-
Very few people have a natural feeling for painting, and so, of course, they naturally think that painting is an expression of the artist's mood. But it rarely is. Very often he may be in greatest despair and be painting his happiest paintings.
-
You shall have atheists strive to get disciples, as it fareth with other sects. And, which is most of all, you shall have of them, that will suffer for atheism, and not recant; whereas if they did truly think, that there were no such thing as God, why should they trouble themselves?
-
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.
-
Sir Henry Wotton used to say that critics are like brushers of noblemen's clothes.
-
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.
-
For the inquisition of Final Causes is barren, and like a virgin consecrated to God produces nothing.
-
Sacred and inspired divinity, the sabaoth and port of all men's labours and peregrinations.
-
A just fear of an imminent danger, though be no blow given, is a lawful cause of war.
-
Age appears to be best in four things; old wood best to burn, old wine to drink, old friends to trust, and old authors to read.
-
Sir Amice Pawlet, when he saw too much haste made in any matter, was wont to say. 'Stay a while, that we may make an end the sooner.'
-
The true bounds and limitations, whereby human knowledge is confined and circumscribed,... are three: the first, that we do not so place our felicity in knowledge, as we forget our mortality: the second, that we make application of our knowledge, to give ourselves repose and contentment, and not distates or repining: the third, that we do not presume by the contemplation of Nature to attain to the mysteries of God.
-
The cause and root of nearly all evils in the sciences is this - that while we falsely admire and extol the powers of the human mind we neglect to seek for its true helps.
-
Who ever is out of patience is out of possession of their soul.
-
[Science is] the labor and handicraft of the mind.
-
The colors that show best by candlelight are white, carnation, and a kind of sea-water green.
-
Reading maketh a full man; and writing an axact man. And, therefore, if a man write little, he need have a present wit; and if he read little, he need have much cunning to seem to know which he doth not.
-
Without friends the world is but a wilderness.
-
It is impossible to love and to be wise.
-
Believe not much them that seem to despise riches, for they despise them that despair of them.