Francis Bacon Quotes

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All sciences are connected, and support each other with mutual aid, as parts of the same whole, of which each performs its work, not for itself alone, but for the others as well : as the eye directs the whole body, and the foot supports the whole; so that any part of knowledge taken from the rest is like an eye torn out or a foot cut off.

Francis Bacon
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.

Francis Bacon
To conclude therefore, let no man upon a weak conceit of sobriety or an ill-applied moderation think or maintain that a man can search too far, or be too well studied in the book of God's words, or in the book of God's work, divinity, or philosophy; but rather let men endeavor an endless progress or proficiency in both.

Francis Bacon
A forbidden writing is thought to be a certain spark of truth, that flies up in the face of them who seek to tread it out.

Francis Bacon
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.

Francis Bacon
Physics inquires into the efficient and the matter, and metaphysics into the form and the end. Physics, therefore, is vague and unstable as to causes, and treats movable bodies as its subjects, without discovering a constancy of causes in different subjects.

Francis Bacon
That conceit which is elegantly expressed by the emperor Charles the fifth in his instructions to the King, his son, "that fortune hath somewhat the nature of a woman, that if she be too much wooed she is the farther off."

Francis Bacon
Men mark when they hit, and never mark when they miss.

Francis Bacon
It is the office of a physician not only to restore health, but to mitigate pain and dolors; and not only when such mitigation may conduce to recovery, but when it may serve to make a fair and easy passage.

Francis Bacon
For it being the nature of the mind of man (to the extreme prejudice of knowledge) to delight in the spacious liberty of generalities, as in a champaign region, and not in the enclosures of particularity, the mathematics of all other knowledge were the goodliest fields to satisfy that appetite.

Francis Bacon
We must first, by every kind of experiment, elicit the discovery of causes and true axioms, and seek for experiments which may afford light rather than profit.

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

Francis Bacon
But this is that which will dignify and exalt knowledge: if contemplation and action be more nearly and straitly conjoined and united together than they have been: a conjunction like unto that of the highest planets, Saturn, the planet of rest and contemplation, and Jupiter, the planet of civil society and action.

Francis Bacon
The true bounds and limitations, whereby human knowledge is confined and circumscribed,... are three: the first, that we do not so place our felicity in knowledge, as we forget our mortality: the second, that we make application of our knowledge, to give ourselves repose and contentment, and not distates or repining: the third, that we do not presume by the contemplation of Nature to attain to the mysteries of God.

Francis Bacon
The divisions of the sciences are not like different lines that meet in one angle, but rather like the branches of trees that join in one trunk.

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

Francis Bacon
Astrology... is so full of superstition, that scarce anything sound can be discovered in it...

Francis Bacon
Insomuch as we see in the schools both of Democritus and of Pythagoras, that the one did ascribe figure to the first seeds of things, and the other did suppose numbers to be the principles and originals of things.

Francis Bacon
In mathematics I can report no deficience, except it be that men do not sufficiently understand the excellent use of the pure mathematics.

Francis Bacon
The lame man who keeps the right road outstrips the runner who takes the wrong one.

Francis Bacon
It is true, that a little philosophy inclineth man's mind to atheism; but depth in philosophy bringeth men's minds about to religion. For while the mind of man looketh upon second causes scattered, it may sometimes rest in them, and go no further; but when it beholdeth the chain of them, confederate and linked together, it must needs fly to Providence and Deity.

Francis Bacon
The colors that show best by candlelight are white, carnation, and a kind of sea-water green.

Francis Bacon
Nothing doth so much keep men out of the Church, and drive men out of the Church, as breach of unity.

Francis Bacon
I have often thought upon death, and I find it the least of all evils.

Francis Bacon
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.

Francis Bacon
I want a very ordered image, but I want it to come about by chance.

Francis Bacon
The men of experiment are like the ant, they only collect and use; the reasoners resemble spiders, who make cobwebs out of their own substance. But the bee takes the middle course, it gathers its material from the flowers of the garden and field, but transforms and digests it by a power of its own.

Francis Bacon
Those who have treated of the sciences have been either empirics or dogmatical. The former like ants only heap up and use their store, the latter like spiders spin out their own webs. The bee, a mean between both, extracts matter from the flower of the garden and the field, but works and fashions it by its own efforts.

Francis Bacon
All true and fruitful natural philosophy hath a double scale or ladder, ascendent and descendent, ascending from experiments to the invention of causes, and descending from causes to the invention of new experiments.

Francis Bacon
But the images of men's wits and knowledges remain in books, exempted from the wrong of time, and capable of perpetual renovation. Neither are they fitly to be called images, because they generate still, and cast their seeds in the minds of others, provoking and causing infinite actions and opinions in succeeding ages.

Francis Bacon