Francis Bacon Quotes on Nature (25 Quotes)

It is a secret both in nature and state, that it is safer to change many things than one.

The eye of the understanding is like the eye of the sense for as you may see great objects through small crannies or holes, so you may see great axioms of nature through small and contemptible instances.

The inclination to goodness is imprinted deeply in the nature of man.

But the idols of the Market Place are the most troublesome of all idols which have crept into the understanding through their alliances with words and names. For men believe that their reason governs words. But words turn and twist the understanding. This it is that has rendered philosophy and the sciences inactive. Words are mostly cut to the common fashion and draw the distinctions which are most obvious to the common understanding. Whenever an understanding of greater acuteness or more diligent observation would alter those lines to suit the true distinctions of nature, words complain.

Nor is mine a trumpet which summons and excites men to cut each other to pieces with mutual contradictions, or to quarrel and fight with one another but rather to make peace between themselves, and turning with united forces against the Nature of Things,

Nature is often hidden, sometimes overcome, seldom extinguished.

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.

The inquiry of truth, which is the love-making, or the 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.

Poesy was ever thought to have some participation of divineness, because it doth raise and erect the mind, by submitting the shows of things to the desires of the mind whereas reason doth buckle and bow the mind unto the nature of things.

Habit, if wisely and skillfully formed, becomes truly a second nature but unskillfully and unmethodically depicted, it will be as it were an ape of nature, which imitates nothing to the life, but only clumsily and awkwardly

There was never miracle wrought by God to convert an atheist, because the light of nature might have led him to confess a God.

Argumentation cannot suffice for the discovery of new work, since the subtlety of Nature is greater many times than the subtlety of argument.

Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed. In everything man has accomplished, we have only manipulated nature into doing what it is.

Over a century after the publication of the Copernican system, one of England's most renowned intellectual luminaries was still unconvinced 'Nevertheless, in the system of Copernicus there are found many and great inconveniences for both the loading of the earth with a triple motion is very incommodious, and the separation of the sun from the company of the planets, with which it has so many passions in common, is likewise a difficulty, and the introduction of so much immobility in nature, by representing the sun and stars as immovable, especially being of all bodies the highest and most radiant, and making the moon revolve about the earth in an epicycle, and some other assumptions of his, are the speculations of one who cares not what fictions he introduces into nature, provided his calculations answer.'

Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed.

The human understanding, from its peculiar nature, easily supposes a greater degree of order and equality in things than it really finds

Nature is a labyrinth in which the very haste you move with will make you lose your way.

Art is man added to nature.

The subtlety of nature is greater many times over than the subtlety of the senses and understanding.

Certainly it is the nature of extreme self-lovers, as they will set an house on fire, and it were but to roast their eggs.

For those who intend to discover and to understand, not to indulge in conjectures and soothsaying, and rather than contrive imitation and fabulous worlds plan to look deep into the nature of the real world and to dissect it -- for them everything must be sought in things themselves.

The pleasure and delight of knowledge and learning, it far surpasseth all other in nature

Nature is commanded by obeying her.

Many secrets of art and nature are thought by the unlearned to be magical.

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.