Francis Bacon Quotes
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Ill Fortune never crushed that man whom good fortune deceived not.
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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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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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The worst men often give the best advice.
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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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People prefer to believe what they want to be true.
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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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He that hath a wife and children hath given hostages to fortune.
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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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Praise from the common people is generally false, and rather follows the vain than the virtuous.
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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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A young man not yet, an elder man not at all.
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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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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 bad man is worse when he pretends to be a saint.
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The monuments of wit survive the monuments of power.
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Children sweeten labours, but they make misfortunes more bitter.
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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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The nature of things betrays itself more readily under the vexations of art than in its natural freedom.
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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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Love and envy make a man pine, which other affections do not, because they are not so continual.
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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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Fashion is only the attempt to realize art in living forms and social intercourse.