Francis Bacon - Nature Quotes

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The weakness of patients, and sweetness of life, and nature of hope, maketh men depend upon physicians with all their defects.

Francis Bacon
As for the mixed mathematics, I may only make this prediction, that there cannot fail to be more kinds of them, as nature grows farther disclosed.

Francis Bacon
Nature is often hidden; sometimes overcome; seldom extinguished.

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
For there is nothing more true in nature than the twin propositions, that "nothing is produced from nothing," and "nothing is reduced to nothing," but that the absolute quantum or sum total of matter remains unchanged, without increase or diminution.

Francis Bacon
There is a great difference between the Idols of the human mind and the Ideas of the divine. That is to say, between certain empty dogmas, and the true signatures and marks set upon the works of creation as they are found in nature.

Francis Bacon
Believing that I was born for the service of mankind, and regarding the care of the commonwealth as a kind of common property which, like the air and the water, belongs to everybody, I set myself to consider in what way mankind might be best served, and what service I was myself best fitted by nature to perform.

Francis Bacon
We can command nature only by obeying her...

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
Human knowledge and human power meet in one; for where the cause is not known the effect cannot be produced. Nature to be commanded must be obeyed; and that which in contemplation is as the cause is in operation as the rule.

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
If you would work any man, you must either know his nature and fashions, and so lead him; or his ends, and so persuade him or his weakness and disadvantages, and so awe him or those that have interest in him, and so govern him. In dealing with cunning persons, we must ever consider their ends, to interpret their speeches; and it is good to say little to them, and that which they least look for. In all negotiations of difficulty, a man may not look to sow and reap at once; but must prepare business, and so ripen it by degrees.

Francis Bacon
Goodness I call the habit, and goodness of nature the inclination. This of all the virtues and dignities of the mind, is the greatest, being the character of the Deity; and without it man is a busy, mischievous, wretched thing.

Francis Bacon
The eye of the understanding is like the eye of the sense: for as you may see great objects through small crannies or levels; so you may see great axioms of nature through small and contemptible instances.

Francis Bacon
There is in human nature generally more of the fool than of the wise; and therefore those faculties by which the foolish part of men's minds are taken are more potent.

Francis Bacon
We are wont to call that human reasoning which we apply to Nature the anticipation of Nature (as being rash and premature) and that which is properly deduced from things the interpretation of Nature.

Francis Bacon
Natures that have much heat, and great and violent desires and perturbations, are not ripe for action till they have passed the meridian of their years.

Francis Bacon
The study of nature with a view to works is engaged in by the mechanic, the mathematician, the physician, the alchemist, and the magician; but by all as things now are with slight endeavour and scanty success.

Francis Bacon
Suspicions amongst thoughts, are like bats amongst birds, they ever fly by twilight. Certainly they are to be repressed, or at least well guarded: for they cloud the mind; they leese friends; and they check with business, whereby business cannot go on currently and constantly. They dispose kings to tyranny, husbands to jealousy, wise men to irresolution and melancholy. They are defects, not in the heart, but in the brain; for they take place in the stoutest natures.

Francis Bacon
Therefore, as atheism is in all respects hateful, so in this, that it depriveth human nature of the means to exalt itself, above human frailty.

Francis Bacon
Man, as the minister and interpreter of nature, dies and understands as much as his observations on the order of nature, either with regard to things or the mind permit him, and neither knows or is capable of more.

Francis Bacon
For many parts of Nature can neither be invented with sufficient subtlety, nor demonstrated with sufficient perspicuity, nor accommodated unto use with sufficient dexterity, without the aid and intervening of the mathematics, of which sort are perspective, music, astronomy, cosmography, architecture, engineery, and divers others.

Francis Bacon
Habit, if wisely and skillfully formed, becomes truly a second nature, as the common saying is; but unskillfully and unmethodically directed, it will be, as it were, the ape of Nature, which imitates nothing to the life, but only clumsily and awkwardly.

Francis Bacon
It is a mere and miserable solitude to want true friends, without which the world is but a wilderness; and even in this scene 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
To spend too much time in studies is sloth; to use them too much for ornament, is affectation; to make judgment wholly by their rules, is the humor of a scholar. They perfect nature, and are perfected by experience: for natural abilities are like natural plants, that need proyning, by study; and studies themselves, do give forth directions too much at large, except they be bounded in by experience.

Francis Bacon
Another argument of hope may be drawn from this — that some of the inventions already known are such as before they were discovered it could hardly have entered any man's head to think of; they would have been simply set aside as impossible. For in conjecturing what may be men set before them the example of what has been, and divine of the new with an imagination preoccupied and colored by the old; which way of forming opinions is very fallacious, for streams that are drawn from the springheads of nature do not always run in the old channels.

Francis Bacon
As for the passions and studies of the mind: avoid envy; anxious fears; anger fretting inwards; subtle and knotty inquisitions; joys and exhilarations in excess; sadness not communicated. Entertain hopes; mirth rather than joy; variety of delights, rather than surfeit of them; wonder and admiration, and therefore novelties; studies that fill the mind with splendid and illustrious objects, as histories, fables, and contemplations of nature.

Francis Bacon
For man seeketh in society comfort, use, and protection: and they be three wisdoms of divers natures, which do often sever: wisdom of the behaviour, wisdom of business, and wisdom of state.

Francis Bacon
A man's nature is best perceived in privateness, for there is no affectation; in passion, for that putteth a man out of his precepts; and in a new case or experiment, for there custom leaveth him.

Francis Bacon
Generally he perceived in men of devout simplicity this opinion: that the secrets of nature were the secrets of God, — part of that glory into which man is not to press too boldly.

Francis Bacon