Francis Bacon Quotes
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If I sit and daydream, the images rush by like a succession of colored slides.
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People prefer to believe what they want to be true.
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The master of superstition, is the people; and in all superstition, wise men follow fools; and arguments are fitted to practice, in a reversed order.
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He that hath a wife and children hath given hostages to fortune.
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People usually think according to their inclinations, speak according to their learning and ingrained opinions, but generally act according to custom.
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The worst men often give the best advice.
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The human understanding is unquiet; it cannot stop or rest, and still presses onward, but in vain. Therefore it is that we cannot conceive of any end or limit to the world, but always as of necessity it occurs to us that there is something beyond... But he is no less an unskilled and shallow philosopher who seeks causes of that which is most general, than he who in things subordinate and subaltern omits to do so.
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Young men, in the conduct and manage of actions, embrace more than they can hold; stir more than they can quiet; fly to the end, without consideration of the means and degrees; pursue some few principles, which they have chanced upon absurdly; care not to innovate, which draws unknown inconveniences; use extreme remedies at first; and, that which doubleth all errors, will not acknowledge or retract them; like an unready horse, that will neither stop nor turn.
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Nothing opens the heart like a true friend, to whom you may impart griefs, joys, fears, hopes...and whatever lies upon the heart.
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Praise from the common people is generally false, and rather follows the vain than the virtuous.
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When a doubt is once received, men labour rather how to keep it a doubt still, than how to solve it; and accordingly bend their wits.
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I think I tend to destroy the better paintings, or those that have been better to a certain extent. I try and take them further, and they lose all their qualities, and they lose everything. I think I would say that I destroy all the better paintings.
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…it is the peculiar and perpetual error of the human understanding to be more moved and excited by affirmatives than by negatives…
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A young man not yet, an elder man not at all.
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The monuments of wit survive the monuments of power.
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A bad man is worse when he pretends to be a saint.
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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; and even in this sense also of solitude, whosoever in the frame of his nature and affections, is unfit for friendship, he taketh it of the beast, and not from humanity.
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It is a miserable state of mind to have few things to desire and many things to fear.
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Love and envy make a man pine, which other affections do not, because they are not so continual.
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He that cannot possibly mend his own case will do what he can to impair another's.
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Children sweeten labours, but they make misfortunes more bitter.
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The Syllogism consists of propositions, propositions consist of words, words are symbols of notions. Therefore if the notions themselves (which is the root of the matter) are confused and over-hastily abstracted from the facts, there can be no firmness in the superstructure. Our only hope therefore lies in a true induction.
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In taking revenge, a man is but even with his enemy; but in passing it over, he is superior.
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The nature of things betrays itself more readily under the vexations of art than in its natural freedom.