Francis Bacon Quotes

Before I start painting I have a slightly ambiguous feeling: happiness is a special excitement because unhappiness is always possible a moment later.

The human understanding when it has once adopted an opinion (either as being the received opinion or as being agreeable to itself) draws all things else to support and agree with it.

A king that would not feel his crown too heavy for him, must wear it every day; but if he think it too light, he knoweth not of what metal it is made.

Wise sayings are not only for ornament, but for action and business, having a point or edge, whereby knots in business are pierced and discovered.

It is nothing won to admit men with an open door, and to receive them with a shut and reserved countenance.

One of the Seven [wise men of Greece] was wont to say: That laws were like cobwebs, where the small flies are caught and the great break through.

It was prettily devised of Aesop, The fly sat on the axle tree of the chariot wheel and said, what dust do I raise!

Money is a great treasure that only increases as you give it away.

First the amendment of their own minds. For the removal of the impediments of the mind will sooner clear the passages of fortune than the obtaining fortune will remove the impediments of the mind.

Dreams, and predictions of astrology....ought to serve but for winter talk by the fireside.

In mathematics I can report no deficiency, except it be that men do not sufficiently understand the excellent use of Pure Mathematics.

Death is a friend of ours; and he that is not ready to entertain him is not at home.

More dangers have deceived men than forced them.

To know truly is to know by causes.

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.'

Boldness is a child of ignorance

Images also help me find and realise ideas. I look at hundreds of very different, contrasting images and I pinch details from them, rather like people who eat from other people's plates.

One of the fathers saith . . . that old men go to death, and death comes to young men.

Look to make your course regular, that men may know beforehand what they may expect.

When any of the four pillars of government-religion, justice, counsel, and treasure-are mainly shaken or weakened, men had need to pray for fair weather.

But we may go further, and affirm most truly, that it is a mere and miserable solitude to want true friends; without which the world is but a wilderness.

Whence we see spiders, flies, or ants entombed and preserved forever in amber, a more than royal tomb.

States are great engines moving slowly.

It's always hopeless to talk about painting - one never does anything but talk around it.

Revenge is a kind of wild justice.

For behavior, men learn it, as they take diseases, one of another.

It is madness and a contradiction to expect that things which were never yet performed should be effected, except by means hitherto untried.

The mold of our fortunes is in our own hands.

Medical men do not know the drugs they use, nor their prices.

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."