C.M. Bacon Quotes

You can't be more horrific than life itself.

Every person born in the USA is endowed with life, liberty, and a substantial share of the national debt.

Friendship redoubleth joys, and cutteth griefs in half.

Photographs are not only points of reference... they're often triggers of ideas.

To seek to extinguish anger utterly is but a bravery of the Stoics. We have better oracles: 'Be angry, but sin not.' 'Let not the sun go down upon your wrath.'

There is little friendship in the world, and least of all between equals.

Why should a man be in love with his fetters, though of gold?

States, as great engines, move slowly.

A good conscience is a continual feast.

Religion brought forth riches, and the daughter devoured the mother.

It is natural to die as to be born.

Again men have been kept back as by a kind of enchantment from progress in science by reverence for antiquity, by the authority of men counted great in philosophy, and then by general consent.

For what a man would like to be true, that he more readily believes.

There was never law, or sect, or opinion did so much magnify goodness, as the Christian religion doth.

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.

The mystery lies in the irrationality by which you make appearance - if it is not irrational, you make illustration.

If a man's wit be not apt to distinguish or find differences, let him study the schoolmen; for they are cymini sectores, splitters of hairs.

An illustrational form tells you through the intelligence immediately what the form is about, whereas a non-illustrational form works first upon sensation and then slowly leaks back into the fact.

And as for Mixed Mathematics, I may only make this prediction, that there cannot fail to be more kinds of them, as nature grows further disclosed.

If my people look as if they're in a dreadful fix, it's because I can't get them out of a technical dilemma.

I knew a wise man that had it for a by-word, when he saw men hasten to a conclusion, "Stay a little, that we may make an end the sooner."

Certainly virtue is like precious odors, most fragrant when they are incensed, or crushed: for prosperity doth best discover vice, but adversity doth best discover virtue.

Man, as the minister and interpreter of nature, is limited in act and understanding by his observation of the order of nature; neither his understanding nor his power extends further.

When I paint I am ageless, I just have the pleasure or the difficulty of painting.

I should have been, I don't know, a con-man, a robber or a prostitute. But it was vanity that made me choose painting, vanity and chance.

In every great time there is some one idea at work which is more powerful than any other, and which shapes the events of the time and determines their ultimate issues.

It would be unsound fancy and self-contradictory to expect that things which have never yet been done can be done except by means which have never yet been tried.

If you want to convey fact, this can only ever be done through a form of distortion. You must distort to transform what is called appearance into image.

The speaking in a perpetual hyperbole is comely in nothing but love.

Be so true to thyself, as thou be not false to others.

All painting is an accident. But it's also not an accident, because one must select what part of the accident one chooses to preserve.

The place of justice is a hallowed place.

Atheism is rather in the lip, than in the heart of man.

The greatest vicissitude of things amongst men, is the vicissitude of sects and religions.

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.

Vices of the time; vices of the man.

The inclination to goodness is imprinted deeply in the nature of man.

Excusations, cessions, modesty itself well governed, are but arts of ostentation.

He that plots to be the only figure among ciphers [zeros], is the decay of the whole age.

I'm just trying to make images as accurately as possible off my nervous system as I can.

You could say that I have no inspiration, that I only need to paint.

I always think of myself not so much as a painter but as a medium for accident and chance.

Aristotle... a mere bond-servant to his logic, thereby rendering it contentious and well nigh useless.

But the best demonstration by far is experience, if it go not beyond the actual experiment.

Men are rather beholden ... generally to chance or anything else, than to logic, for the invention of arts and sciences.

Friendship maketh daylight in the understanding, out of darkness and confusion of thoughts.

Mark what a generosity and courage (a dog) will put on when he finds himself maintained by a man, who to him is instead of a God

For fountains, they are a Great Beauty and Refreshment, but Pools mar all, and make the Garden unwholesome, and full of Flies and Frogs.

The errors of young men are the ruin of business, but the errors of aged men amount to this, that more might have been done, or sooner.

Nothing is to be feared but fear.