Francis Bacon Quotes
-
The genius, wit, and the spirit of a nation are discovered by their proverbs.
-
Dreams, and predictions of astrology....ought to serve but for winter talk by the fireside.
-
Money is a great servant but a bad master.
-
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.
-
The virtue of prosperity is temperance; the virtue of adversity is fortitude.
-
Natural abilities are like natural plants, that need pruning by study; and studies themselves do give forth directions too much at large, except they be bounded in by experience.
-
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.
-
The momentous thing in human life is the art of winning the soul to good or evil.
-
The subtlety of nature is greater many times over than the subtlety of the senses and understanding.
-
The best armor is to keep out of gunshot.
-
Moreover, the works already known are due to chance and experiment rather than to sciences; for the sciences we now possess are merely systems for the nice ordering and setting forth of things already invented; not methods of invention or directions for new works.
-
Like strawberry wives, that laid two or three great strawberries at the mouth of their pot, and all the rest were little ones.
-
God's first creature, which was light.
-
Silence is the virtue of fools.
-
It is natural to die as to be born.
-
In things that are tender and unpleasing, it is good to break the ice by some one whose words are of less weight, and to reserve the more weighty voice to come in as by chance.
-
We read that we ought to forgive our enemies; but we do not read that we ought to forgive our friends.
-
Suspicion amongst thoughts are like bats amongst birds, they never fly by twilight.
-
But men must know, that in this theatre of man's life it is reserved only for God and angels to be lookers on.
-
But the greatest error of all the rest is the mistaking or misplacing of the last or farthest end of knowledge: for men have entered into a desire of learning and knowledge, sometimes upon a natural curiosity and inquisitive appetite; sometimes to entertain their minds with variety and delight; sometimes for ornament and reputation; and sometimes to enable them to victory of wit and contradiction; and most times for lucre and profession; and seldom sincerely to give a true account of their gift of reason, to the benefit and use of men.
-
Truth ... is the sovereign good of human nature.
-
In the same manner as we are cautioned by religion to show our faith by our works we may very properly apply the principle to philosophy, and judge of it by its works; accounting that to be futile which is unproductive, and still more so, if instead of grapes and olives it yield but the thistle and thorns of dispute and contention.
-
For cleanness of body was ever esteemed to proceed from a due reverence to God, to society, and to ourselves.
-
In all superstition wise men follow fools.