Francis Bacon Quotes
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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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Chiefly the mold of a man's fortune is in his own hands.
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The worst solitute is to be destitute of true friendship.
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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.
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In charity there is no excess.
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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.
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Beware of sudden change, in any great point of diet, and, if necessity inforce it, fit the rest to it. For it is a secret both in nature and state, that it is safer to change many things, than one.
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Revenge is a kind of wild justice.
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I would like my pictures to look as if a human being had passed between them, like a snail, leaving a trail of the human presence and memory trace of past events, as the snail leaves its slime.
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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.'
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Philosophy when superficially studied, excites doubt, when thoroughly explored, it dispels it.
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Who ever is out of patience is out of possession of their soul.
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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.
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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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It hath been an opinion that the French are wiser than they seem, and the Spaniards seem wiser than they are; but howsoever it be between nations, certainly it is so between man and man.
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The voice of the people has about it something divine: for how otherwise can so many heads agree together as one?
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The job of the artist is always to deepen the mystery.
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Without friends the world is but a wilderness.
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Glorious men are the scorn of wise men, the admiration of fools, the idols of parasites, and the slaves of their own vaunts.
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There is a cunning which we in England call 'the turning of the cat in the pan;' which is, when that which a man says to another, he lays it as if another had said it to him.
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[Science is] the labor and handicraft of the mind.
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But we are not dedicating or building any Capitol or Pyramid to human Pride, but found a holy temple in the human Intellect, on the model of the Universe... For whatever is worthy of Existence is worthy of Knowledge-which is the Image (or Echo) of Existence.
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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.
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Deformed persons commonly take revenge on nature.