Francis Bacon Quotes
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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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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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A young man not yet, an elder man not at all.
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A bad man is worse when he pretends to be a saint.
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Boldness is ever blind, for it sees not dangers and inconveniences whence it is bad in council though good in execution.
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The monuments of wit survive the monuments of power.
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Mysteries are due to secrecy.
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Much bending breaks the bow; much unbending the mind.
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Fashion is only the attempt to realize art in living forms and social intercourse.
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Speech of yourself ought to be seldom and well chosen.
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Truth is so hard to tell, it sometimes needs fiction to make it plausible.
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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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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.
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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.
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Princes are like heavenly bodies, which cause good or evil times, and which have much veneration but no rest.
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Whosoever is delighted in solitude is either a wild beast or a god.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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I always think of myself not so much as a painter but as a medium for accident and chance.
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Truth can never be reached by just listening to the voice of an authority.
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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.
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It was prettily devised of Aesop, The fly sat on the axle tree of the chariot wheel and said, what dust do I raise!
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My Lord St. Albans said that Nature did never put her precious jewels into a garret four stories high, and therefore that exceeding tall men had ever very empty heads.