Francis Bacon Quotes

563 Sourced Quotes

There is surely no greater wisdom than well to time the beginnings and endings of things.

Francis Bacon
God forbid that we should give out a dream of our own imagination for a pattern of the world.

Francis Bacon
Nature is a labyrinth in which the very haste you move with, will make you lose your way.

Francis Bacon
Our humanity were a poor thing but for the divinity that stirs within us.

Francis Bacon
Nay, number (itself) in armies, importeth not much, where the people is of weak courage; for (as Virgil saith) it never troubles the wolf how many the sheep be.

Francis Bacon
Contempt putteth an edge upon anger more than the hurt itself.

Francis Bacon
Antiquities are history defaced, or some remnants of history which have casually escaped the shipwreck of time.

Francis Bacon
Men seem neither to understand their riches nor their strength; of the former they believe greater things than they should; of the latter much less. Self-reliance and self-denial will teach a man to drink out of his own cistern, and eat his own sweet bread, and to learn and labor truly to get his living, and carefully to expend the good things committed to his trust.

Francis Bacon
Imagination I understand to be the representation of an individual thought. Imagination is of three kinds: joined with belief of that which is to come; joined with memory of that which is past; and of things present.

Francis Bacon
…it is the peculiar and perpetual error of the human understanding to be more moved and excited by affirmatives than by negatives…

Francis Bacon
The inquiry of truth, which is the love-making, or wooing of it, the knowledge of truth, which is the presence of it, and the belief of truth, which is the enjoying of it, is the sovereign good of human nature.

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

Francis Bacon
Studies teach not their own use; but that is a wisdom without them, and above them, won by observation.

Francis Bacon
Certainly fame is like a river, that beareth up things light and swoln, and drowns things weighty and solid.

Francis Bacon
There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion.

Francis Bacon
All the crimes on earth do not destroy so much of the human race, nor alienate so much property as drunkenness.

Francis Bacon
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; and even in this sense also of solitude, whosoever in the frame of his nature and affections, is unfit for friendship, he taketh it of the beast, and not from humanity.

Francis Bacon
Three means to fortify belief are experience, reason, and authority. Of these the more potent is authority; for belief upon reason or experience will stagger.

Francis Bacon
The world's a bubble, and the life of man
Less than a span.

Francis Bacon
Usury dulls and damps all industries, improvements, and new inventions, wherein money would be stirring if it were not for this slug.

Francis Bacon
For I find that even those that have sought knowledge for itself and not for benefit, or ostentation, or any practical enablement in the course of their life, have nevertheless propounded to themselves a wrong mark, namely, satisfaction, which men call truth, and not operation. For as in the courts and services of princes and states, it is a much easier matter to give satisfaction than to do the business; so in the inquiring of causes and reasons it is much easier to find out such causes as will satisfy the mind of man, and quiet objections, than such causes as will direct him and give him light to new experiences and inventions.

Francis Bacon
Liberty of speech invites and provokes liberty to be used again, and so bringeth much to a man's knowledge.

Francis Bacon
So when any of the four pillars of government are mainly shakened or weakened (which are religion, justice, counsel, and treasure) men had need to pray for fair weather.

Francis Bacon
A man shall see, where there is a house full of children, one or two of the eldest restricted, and the youngest ruined by indulgence; but in the midst, some that are, as it were, forgotten, who many times, nevertheless, prove the best.

Francis Bacon
God never wrought miracles to convince atheism, because His ordinary works convince it.

Francis Bacon
I bequeath my soul to God... My body to be buried obscurely. For my name and memory, I leave it to men's charitable speeches, and to foreign nations, and the next age.

Francis Bacon
God Almighty first planted a garden. And indeed it is the purest of human pleasures: It is the greatest refreshment to the spirits of man.

Francis Bacon
No receipt openeth the heart but a true friend, to whom you may impart griefs, joys, fears, hopes, suspicions, counsels, and whatsoever lieth upon the heart to oppress it, in a kind of civil shrift or confession.

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

Francis Bacon
That all things are changed, and that nothing really perishes, and that the sum of matter remains exactly the same, is sufficiently certain.

Francis Bacon