Francis Bacon Quotes

563 Sourced Quotes

Suspicions among thoughts are like bats amongst birds, they ever fly to twilight; they are to be repressed, or, at least, well guarded, for they cloud the mind.

Francis Bacon
The road to true philosophy is precisely the same with that which leads to true religion; and from both the one and the other, unless we would enter in as little children, we must expect to be totally excluded.

Francis Bacon
I will say positively and resolutely that is it impossible an elective monarchy should be so free and absolute as an hereditary.

Francis Bacon
They are ill discoverers that think there is no land, when they can see nothing but sea.

Francis Bacon
A man would die, though he were neither valiant nor miserable, only upon a weariness to do the same thing so often over and over again.

Francis Bacon
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.

Francis Bacon
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 anger. Anger must be limited and confined, both in race and in time.

Francis Bacon
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.

Francis Bacon
Houses are built to live in and not to look on; therefore let use be preferred before uniformity, except where both may be had.

Francis Bacon
Death…openeth the gate to good fame, and extinguisheth envy.

Francis Bacon
There is a cunning which we in England call "the turning of the cat in the pan;" which is, when that which a man says to another, he lays it as if another had said it to him.

Francis Bacon
Seek not proud riches, but such as thou may'st get justly, use soberly, distribute cheerfully, and leave contentedly; yet have no abstract nor friarly contempt of them.

Francis Bacon
Fortitude is the marshal of thought, the armor of the will, and the fort of reason.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Francis Bacon