Francis Bacon Quotes
-
Never any knowledge was delivered in the same order it was invented.
-
The human understanding, when any preposition has been once laid down... forces everything else to add fresh support and confirmation; and although more cogent and abundant instances may exist to the contrary, yet it either does not observe them or it despises them, or it gets rid of and rejects them by some distinction, with violent and injurious prejudice, rather than sacrifice the authority of its first conclusions.
-
People usually think according to their inclinations, speak according to their learning and ingrained opinions, but generally act according to custom.
-
I always think of myself not so much as a painter but as a medium for accident and chance.
-
A bad man is worse when he pretends to be a saint.
-
Love and envy make a man pine, which other affections do not, because they are not so continual.
-
Boldness is ever blind, for it sees not dangers and inconveniences whence it is bad in council though good in execution.
-
Fashion is only the attempt to realize art in living forms and social intercourse.
-
It is a miserable state of mind to have few things to desire and many things to fear.
-
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 nature of things betrays itself more readily under the vexations of art than in its natural freedom.
-
A young man not yet, an elder man not at all.
-
…it is the peculiar and perpetual error of the human understanding to be more moved and excited by affirmatives than by negatives…
-
He that hath a wife and children hath given hostages to fortune.
-
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.
-
There is nothing makes a man suspect much, more than to know little, and therefore men should remedy suspicion by procuring to know more, and not keep their suspicions in smother.
-
There is no passion in the mind of man so weak, but it mates and masters the fear of death . . . Revenge triumphs over death; love slights it; honor aspireth to it; grief flieth to it.
-
It was prettily devised of Aesop, The fly sat on the axle tree of the chariot wheel and said, what dust do I raise!
-
The monuments of wit survive the monuments of power.
-
The human understanding of its own nature is prone to suppose the existence of more order and regularity in the world than it finds.
-
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.
-
When a traveler returneth home, let him not leave the countries where he hath traveled altogether behind him.
-
Princes are like heavenly bodies, which cause good or evil times, and which have much veneration but no rest.