Francis Bacon Quotes
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Primum quaerite bona animi; caetera aut aderunt, aut non oberunt
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Natural abilities are like natural plants, that need pruning by study; and studies themselves do give forth directions too much at large, except they be bounded in by experience.
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Beauty itself is but the sensible image of the Infinite.
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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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When a traveler returneth home, let him not leave the countries where he hath traveled altogether behind him.
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If we do not maintain justice, justice will not maintain us.
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Much bending breaks the bow; much unbending the mind.
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It is natural to die as to be born.
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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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People have discovered that they can fool the devil; but they can't fool the neighbors.
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Rather to excite your judgment briefly than to inform it tediously.
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God Almighty first planted a garden. And indeed, it is the purest of human pleasures.
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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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We cannot command Nature except by obeying her.
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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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They that reverence to much old times are but a scorn to the new.
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The ill and unfit choice of words wonderfully obstructs the understanding.
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Anger makes dull men witty, but it keeps them poor.
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Never any knowledge was delivered in the same order it was invented.
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We are much beholden to Machiavel and others, that write what men do, and not what they ought to do.
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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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Vain-glorious men are the scorn of the wise, the admiration of fools, the idols of paradise, and the slaves of their own vaunts.
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Men ought to find the difference between saltiness and bitterness. Certainly, he that hath a satirical vein, as he maketh others afraid of his wit, so he had need be afraid of others' memory.
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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.