-
We must see whether the same clock with weights will go faster at the top of a mountain or at the bottom of a mine; it is probable, if the pull of the weights decreases on the mountain and increases in the mine, that the earth has real attraction.
Francis Bacon -
Friends are thieves of time.
Francis Bacon
-
God never wrought miracles to convince atheism, because his ordinary works convince it.
Francis Bacon -
Perils commonly ask to be paid in pleasures.
Francis Bacon -
Suspicions that the mind, of itself, gathers, are but buzzes; but suspicions that are artificially nourished and put into men's heads by the tales and whisperings of others, have stings.
Francis Bacon -
Come home to men's business and bosoms.
Francis Bacon -
My painting is not violent, it's life that is violent. Even within the most beautiful landscape, in the trees, under the leaves, the insects are eating each other; violence is a part of life. We are born with a scream; we come into life with a scream and maybe love is a mosquito net between the fear of living and the fear of death.
Francis Bacon -
Let no one think or maintain that a person can search too far or be too well studied in either the book of God's word or the book of God's works.
Francis Bacon
-
Truth is a naked and open daylight, that does not show the masques, and mummeries, and triumphs of the world, half so stately and daintily as candle-lights. . . A mixture of a lie doth ever add pleasure.
Francis Bacon -
The greatest trust, between man and man, is the trust of giving counsel. For in other confidences, men commit the parts of life; their lands, their goods, their children, their credit, some particular affair; but to such as they make their counsellors, they commit the whole: by how much the more, they are obliged to all faith and integrity.
Francis Bacon -
Histories make men wise; poets, witty; the mathematics, subtle; natural philosophy, deep; moral, grave; logic and rhetoric, able to contend.
Francis Bacon -
He that seeketh to be eminent amongst able men hath a great task; but that is ever good for the public. But he that plots to be the only figure amongst ciphers is the decay of a whole age.
Francis Bacon -
Our humanity is a poor thing, except for the divinity that stirs within us.
Francis Bacon -
Who then to frail mortality shall trust But limns the water, or but writes in dust.
Francis Bacon
-
He that gives good advice, builds with one hand; he that gives good counsel and example, builds with both; but he that gives good admonition and bad example, builds with one hand and pulls down with the other.
Francis Bacon -
Audacter calumniare, semper aliquid haeret.
Francis Bacon -
Young people are fitter to invent than to judge; fitter for execution than for counsel; and more fit for new projects than for settled business.
Francis Bacon -
Since custom is the principal magistrate of man's life, let men by all means endeavor to obtain good customs.
Francis Bacon -
He that hath wife and children hath given hostages to fortune, for they are impediments to great enterprises, either of virtue or mischief. Certainly the best works and of greatest merit for the public have proceeded from the unmarried or childless men, which both in affection and means have married and endowed the public. He was reputed one of the wise men that made answer to the question, when a man should marry. A young man not yet, an elder man not at all.
Francis Bacon -
People prefer to believe what they want to be true.
Francis Bacon
-
A man that hath no virtue in himself, ever envieth virtue in others. For men's minds, will either feed upon their own good, or upon others' evil; and who wanteth the one, will prey upon the other; and whoso is out of hope, to attain to another's virtue, will seek to come at even hand, by depressing another's fortune.
Francis Bacon -
A forbidden writing is thought to be a certain spark of truth, that flies up in the face of them who seek to tread it out.
Francis Bacon -
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.
Francis Bacon -
If I go to the National Gallery and I look at one of the great paintings that excite me there, it's not so much the painting that excites me as that the painting unlocks all kinds of valves of sensation within me which return me to life more violently.
Francis Bacon