Francis Bacon Quotes
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Philosophers make imaginary laws for imaginary commonwealths, and their discourses are as the stars, which give little light because they are so high.
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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 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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Cato said the best way to keep good acts in memory was to refresh them with new.
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Those herbs which perfume the air most delightfully, not passed by as the rest, but, being trodden upon and crushed, are three; that is, burnet, wild thyme and watermints. Therefore, you are to set whole alleys of them, to have the pleasure when you walk or tread.
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Antiquitas saeculi juventus mundi. The age of antiquity is the youth of the world. These times are the ancient times, when the world is ancient, and not those which we account ancient ordine retrogrado, by a computation backward from ourselves.
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The zeal which begins with hypocrisy must conclude in treachery at first it deceives, at last it betrays.
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I do not believe that any man fears to be dead, but only the stroke of death.
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Atheism is rather in the lip, than in the heart of man.
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Therefore if a man look sharply and attentively, he shall see Fortune; for though she be blind, yet she is not invisible.
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There is as much difference between the counsel that a friend giveth, and that a man giveth himself, as there is between the counsel of a friend and of a flatterer. For there is no such flatterer as is a man's self.
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It is in life as it is in ways, the shortest way is commonly the foulest, and surely the fairer way is not much about.
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Atheism leaves a man to sense, to philosophy, to natural piety, to laws, to reputation, all which may be guides to an outward moral virtue, though religion were not; but superstition dismounts all these, and erects an absolute monarchy in the minds of men.
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Truth emerges more readily from error than from confusion.
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It is madness and a contradiction to expect that things which were never yet performed should be effected, except by means hitherto untried.
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The cord breaketh at last by the weakest pull.
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The bee enclosed and through the amber shown Seems buried in the juice which was his own.
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Rather to excite your judgment briefly than to inform it tediously.
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The ill and unfit choice of words wonderfully obstructs the understanding.
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They that reverence to much old times are but a scorn to the new.