Famous Quotes

Quotes by Francis Bacon

• Natural abilities are like natural plants, that need pruning by study and studies themselves do give forth directions too much at large, except they be bounded in by experience.
• Nature is often hidden, sometimes overcome, seldom extinguished.
• Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed.
• Next to religion, let your care be to promote justice.
• Nothing doth more hurt in a state than that cunning men pass for wise.
• People usually think according to their inclinations, speak according to their learning and ingrained opinions, but generally act according to custom.
• Prosperity is not without many fears and distastes adversity not without many comforts and hopes.
• Revenge is a kind of wild justice, which the more a man's nature runs to, the more ought law to weed it out.
• Science is but an image of the truth.
• Silence is the sleep that nourishes wisdom.
• Small amounts of philosophy lead to atheism, but larger amounts bring us back to God.
• Studies perfect nature and are perfected still by experience.
• The best part of beauty is that which no picture can express.
• The desire of excessive power caused the angels to fall the desire of knowledge caused men to fall.
• The great end of life is not knowledge but action.
• The momentous thing in human life is the art of winning the soul to good or evil.
• The root of all superstition is that men observe when a thing hits, but not when it misses.
• The subtlety of nature is greater many times over than the subtlety of the senses and understanding.
• The worst men often give the best advice.
• There is a difference between happiness and wisdom: he that thinks himself the happiest man is really so but he that thinks himself the wisest is generally the greatest fool.
• There is a wisdom in this beyond the rules of physic: a man's own observation what he finds good of and what he finds hurt of is the best physic to preserve health.
• There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion.
• They are ill discoverers that think there is no land, when they can see nothing but sea.
• Things alter for the worse spontaneously, if they be not altered for the better designedly.
• Travel, in the younger sort, is a part of education in the elder, a part of experience.
• Truth emerges more readily from error than from confusion.
• Truth is a good dog but always beware of barking too close to the heels of an error, lest you get your brains kicked out.
• Truth is so hard to tell, it sometimes needs fiction to make it plausible.
• Truth is the daughter of time, not of authority.
• Virtue is like a rich stone, best plain set.
• We cannot command Nature except by obeying her.
• What is truth? said jesting Pilate and would not stay for an answer.
• When a man laughs at his troubles he loses a great many friends. They never forgive the loss of their prerogative.
• Who ever is out of patience is out of possession of their soul.
• Whosoever is delighted in solitude is either a wild beast or a god.
• Wise men make more opportunities than they find.
• Wives are young men's mistresses, companions for middle age, and old men's nurses.