Francis Bacon Quotes
Nothing doth more hurt in a state than that cunning men pass for wise.
The sun, which passeth through pollutions and itself remains as pure as before.
Reading maketh a full man, conference a ready man, and writing an exact man.
A little philosophy inclineth man’s mind to atheism, but depth in philosophy bringeth men’s minds about to religion.
Hope is a good breakfast, but it is a bad supper.
A healthy body is the guest-chamber of the soul; a sick, its prison.
There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion.
There is nothing more certain in nature than that it is impossible for any body to be utterly annihilated.
Chiefly the mould of a man’s fortune is in his own hands.
They are ill discoverers that think there is no land, when they can see nothing but sea.
Natural abilities are like natural plants; they need pruning by study.
If a man look sharply and attentively, he shall see Fortune; for though she is blind, she is not invisible.
Truth is the daughter of time, not of authority.
Time, which is the author of authors.
Silence is the virtue of fools.
Books must follow sciences, and not sciences books.
Time is the greatest innovator.
We cannot conceive of any end or limit to the world, but always as of necessity it occurs to us that there is something beyond...
All colours will agree in the dark.
It is not the lie that passeth through the mind, but the lie that sinketh in and settleth in it, that doth the hurt.
The human understanding is of its own nature prone to suppose the existence of more order and regularity in the world than it finds.
Those who have taken upon them to lay down the law of nature as a thing already searched out and understood, whether they have spoken in simple assurance or professional affectation, have therein done philosophy and the sciences great injury.
Read not to contradict and confute, nor to find talk and discourse, but to weigh and consider.
Variant: Read not to contradict and confute, not to believe and take for granted, not to find talk and discourse, but to weigh and consider.
It hath been an opinion that the French are wiser than they seem, and the Spaniards seem wiser than they are; but howsoever it be between nations, certainly it is so between man and man.
Physic is of little use to a temperate person, for a man's own observation on what he finds does him good or what hurts him, is the best physic to preserve health.
If a man be gracious and courteous to strangers, it shows he is a citizen of the world, and that his heart is no island cut off from other lands, but a continent that joins to them.
Travel, in the younger sort, is a part of education; in the elder, a part of experience. He that travelleth into a country before he hath some entrance into the language, goeth to school, and not to travel.
Man, being the servant and interpreter of Nature, can do and understand so much and so much only as he has observed in fact or in thought of the course of nature. Beyond this he neither knows anything nor can do anything.
It is idle to expect any great advancement in science from the superinducing and engrafting of new things upon old. We must begin anew from the very foundations, unless we would revolve for ever in a circle with mean and contemptible progress.
Far more, however, has knowledge suffered from littleness of spirit and the smallness and slightness of the tasks which human industry has proposed to itself. And what is worst of all, this very littleness of spirit comes with a certain air of arrogance and superiority.