Francis Bacon Quotes
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Truth may perhaps come to the price of a pearl, that showeth best by day; but it will not rise to the price of a diamond or carbuncle, that showeth best in varied lights. A mixture of a lie doth ever add pleasure. Doth any man doubt that, if there were taken out of men's minds vain opinions, flattering hopes, false valuations, imaginations as one would, and the like, but it would leave the minds of a number of men poor shrunken things, full of melancholy and indisposition, and unpleasing to themselves?
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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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Much bending breaks the bow; much unbending the mind.
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Speech of yourself ought to be seldom and well chosen.
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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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Beauty itself is but the sensible image of the Infinite.
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Read not to contradict and confute, nor to believe and take for granted... but to weigh and consider.
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People have discovered that they can fool the devil; but they can't fool the neighbors.
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If I might control the literature of the household, I would guarantee the well-being of Church and State.
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The nature of things betrays itself more readily under the vexations of art than in its natural freedom.
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They who derive their worth from their ancestors resemble potatoes, the most valuable part of which is underground.
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Never any knowledge was delivered in the same order it was invented.
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To know truly is to know by causes.
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They that reverence to much old times are but a scorn to the new.
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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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In taking revenge, a man is but even with his enemy; but in passing it over, he is superior.
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The momentous thing in human life is the art of winning the soul to good or evil.
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The worst solitude is to have no real friendships.
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There is superstition in avoiding superstition.
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Revenge is a kind of wild justice, which the more a man's nature runs to, the more ought law to weed it out.
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Praise from the common people is generally false, and rather follows the vain than the virtuous.
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The subtlety of nature is greater many times over than the subtlety of the senses and understanding.
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The ill and unfit choice of words wonderfully obstructs the understanding.
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The images of mens wits and knowledge remain in books. They generate still, and cast their seeds in the minds of others, provoking and causing infinite actions and opinions in succeeding ages.