Francis Bacon Quotes
-
People usually think according to their inclinations, speak according to their learning and ingrained opinions, but generally act according to custom.
-
Praise from the common people is generally false, and rather follows the vain than the virtuous.
-
Rebellions of the belly are the worst.
-
We are much beholden to Machiavel and others, that write what men do, and not what they ought to do.
-
Boldness is ever blind, for it sees not dangers and inconveniences whence it is bad in council though good in execution.
-
Upon a given body to generate and superinduce a new nature or new natures is the work and aim of human power. To discover the Form of a given nature, or its true difference, or its causal nature, or fount of its emanation... this is the work and aim of human knowledge.
-
Why should a man be in love with his fetters, though of gold?
-
Never any knowledge was delivered in the same order it was invented.
-
The virtue of prosperity is temperance; the virtue of adversity is fortitude.
-
The desire of excessive power caused the angels to fall; the desire of knowledge caused men to fall.
-
Speech of yourself ought to be seldom and well chosen.
-
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.
-
A sudden bold and unexpected question doth many times surprise a man and lay him open.
-
Some artists leave remarkable things which, a 100 years later, don't work at all. I have left my mark; my work is hung in museums, but maybe one day the Tate Gallery or the other museums will banish me to the cellar... you never know.
-
Mysteries are due to secrecy.
-
The human understanding of its own nature is prone to suppose the existence of more order and regularity in the world than it finds.
-
I'm just trying to make images as accurately as possible off my nervous system as I can.
-
Seeming wise men may make shift to get opinion; but let no man choose them for employment; for certainly you were better take for business, a man somewhat absurd, than over-formal.
-
The nature of things betrays itself more readily under the vexations of art than in its natural freedom.
-
Fashion is only the attempt to realize art in living forms and social intercourse.
-
Whosoever is delighted in solitude is either a wild beast or a god.
-
Dreams, and predictions of astrology....ought to serve but for winter talk by the fireside.
-
The monuments of wit survive the monuments of power.
-
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.