Francis Bacon Quotes

Journeys at youth are part of the education; but at maturity, are part of the experience.

Travel, in the younger sort, is a part of education; in the elder, a part of experience.

To suffering there is a limit; to fearing, none.

Ill Fortune never crushed that man whom good fortune deceived not.

Important families are like potatoes. The best parts are underground.

It has well been said that the arch-flatterer, with whom all petty flatterers have intelligence, is a man's self.

If a man's wit be wandering, let him study the mathematics.

Fashion is only the attempt to realize art in living forms and social intercourse.

Revenge is a kind of wild justice, which the more a man's nature runs to, the more ought law to weed it out.

Truth emerges more readily from error than from confusion.

Riches are for spending.

Rather to excite your judgment briefly than to inform it tediously.

There ought to be gardens for all months in the year, in which, severally, things of beauty may be then in season.

Books must follow sciences, and not sciences books.

Suspicion amongst thoughts are like bats amongst birds, they never fly by twilight.

Never any knowledge was delivered in the same order it was invented.

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.

Gardening is the purest of human pleasures.

Books will speak plain when counselors blanch.

All colours will agree in the dark.

Let every student of nature take this as his rule, that whatever the mind seizes upon with particular satisfaction is to be held in suspicion.

The pencil of the Holy Ghost hath labored more in describing the afflictions of Job than the felicities of Solomon.

Riches are a good hand maiden, but a poor mistress.

Lies are sufficient to breed opinion, and opinion brings on substance.

Men suppose their reason has command over their words; still it happens that words in return exercise authority on reason

Science is but an image of the truth.

We read that we ought to forgive our enemies; but we do not read that we ought to forgive our friends.

All artists are vain, they long to be recognized and to leave something to posterity. They want to be loved, and at the same time they want to be free. But nobody is free.

I do not believe that any man fears to be dead, but only the stroke of death.

Money is like muck, not good unless spread.

By indignities men come to dignities.

The surest way to prevent seditions...is to take away the matter of them.

The shadow escapes from the body like an animal we had been sheltering.

Reading maketh a full man.

A man that is young in years may be old in hours if he have lost no time.

It is as hard and severe a thing to be a true politician as to be truly moral.

He that cannot possibly mend his own case will do what he can to impair another's.

The ill and unfit choice of words wonderfully obstructs the understanding.

Nothing destroys authority more than the unequal and untimely interchange of power stretched too far and relaxed too much.

Therefore if a man look sharply and attentively, he shall see Fortune; for though she be blind, yet she is not invisible.

In all superstition wise men follow fools.

Opportunity makes a thief.

It is as natural to die as to be born; and to a little infant, perhaps, the one is as painful as the other.

In nature things move violently to their place, and calmly in their place.

Generally he perceived in men of devout simplicity this opinion: that the secrets of nature were the secrets of God, part of that glory into which man is not to press too boldly.

Fame is like a river, that beareth up things light and swollen, and drowns things weighty and solid.

The remedy is worse than the disease.

Truth comes out of error more readily than out of confusion.

Fortune is like the market, where, many times, if you can stay a little, the price will fall.

Without friends the world is but a wilderness.