Francis Bacon Quotes

563 Sourced Quotes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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
Praise from the common people is generally false, and rather follows vain persons than virtuous ones.

Francis Bacon
It is as natural to die as to be born; and to a little infant, perhaps, the one is as painful as the other.

Francis Bacon
Base and crafty cowards are like the arrow that flieth in the dark.

Francis Bacon
This misplacing hath caused a deficience, or at least a great improficience in the sciences themselves. For the handling of final causes, mixed with the rest in physical inquiries, hath intercepted the severe and diligent inquiry of all real and physical causes, and given men the occasion to stay upon these satisfactory and specious causes, to the great arrest and prejudice of further discovery. For this I find done not only by Plato, who ever anchoreth upon that shore, but by Aristotle, Galen, and others which do usually likewise fall upon these flats of discoursing causes.

Francis Bacon
It cannot be that axioms established by argumentation should avail for the discovery of new works, since the subtlety of nature is greater many times over than the subtlety of argument. But axioms duly and orderly formed from particulars easily discover the way to new particulars, and thus render sciences active.

Francis Bacon
Superstition, without a veil, is a deformed thing; for, as it addeth deformity to an ape to be so like a man, so the similitude of superstition to religion makes it the more deformed; and as wholesome meat corrupteth to little worms, so good forms and orders corrupt into a number of petty observances.

Francis Bacon
Thales was reputed to be one of the wise men who made answer to the question when a man should marry: "A young man not yet, an old man not at all."

Francis Bacon
Neither the naked hand nor the understanding, left to itself, can do much; the work is accomplished by instruments and helps, of which the need is not less for the understanding than the hand.

Francis Bacon
The partitions of knowledge are not like several lines that meet in one angle, and so touch not in a point; but are like branches of a tree, that meet in a stem, which hath a dimension and quantity of entireness and continuance, before it come to discontinue and break itself into arms and boughs.

Francis Bacon