Francis Bacon Quotes
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Antiquities are history defaced, or some remnants of history which have casually escaped the shipwreck of time.
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The human understanding, from its peculiar nature, easily supposes a greater degree of order and equality in things than it really finds.
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It is not the lie that passeth through the mind, but the lie that sinketh in and settleth in it, that doth the hurt.
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I confess that I have as vast contemplative ends, as I have moderate civil ends: for I have taken all knowledge to be my province.
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The way of fortune is like the milkyway in the sky; which is a number of small stars, not seen asunder, but giving light together: so it is a number of little and scarce discerned virtues, or rather faculties and customs, that make men fortunate.
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If we are to achieve things never before accomplished we must employ methods never before attempted.
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The great advantages of simulation and dissimulation are three. First to lay asleep opposition and to surprise. For where a man's intentions are published, it is an alarum to call up all that are against them. The second is to reserve a man's self a fair retreat: for if a man engage himself, by a manifest declaration, he must go through, or take a fall. The third is, the better to discover the mind of another. For to him that opens himself, men will hardly show themselves adverse; but will fair let him go on, and turn their freedom of speech to freedom of thought.
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Certainly the best works, and of greatest merit for the public, have proceeded from the unmarried, or childless men.
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Nothing is more pleasant to the eye than green grass kept finely shorn.
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The human understanding is like a false mirror, which, receiving rays irregularly, distorts and discolors the nature of things by mingling its own nature with it.
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The essential form of knowledge... is nothing but a representation of truth: for the truth of being and the truth of knowing are one, differing no more than the direct beam and the beam reflected.
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Why should a man be in love with his fetters, though of gold?
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To spend too much time in studies is sloth.
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If I sit and daydream, the images rush by like a succession of colored slides.
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Knowledge is power.
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A principal fruit of friendship, is the ease and discharge of the fullness and swellings of the heart, which passions of all kinds do cause and induce.
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But I account the use that a man should seek of the publishing of his own writings before his death, to be but an untimely anticipation of that which is proper to follow a man, and not to go along with him.
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Cato said the best way to keep good acts in memory was to refresh them with new.
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Fortune is like the market, where, many times, if you can stay a little, the price will fall.
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Studies perfect nature and are perfected still by experience.
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Excusations, cessions, modesty itself well governed, are but arts of ostentation.
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All bravery stands upon comparisons.
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As is the garden such is the gardener. A man's nature runs either to herbs or weeds.
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Truth is so hard to tell, it sometimes needs fiction to make it plausible.