Francis Bacon Quotes (437 Quotes)

Truth is the daughter of time, not of authority.

By taking revenge, a man is but even with his enemy But in passing over it, he is superior.

The poets did well to conjoin music and medicine, because the office of medicine is but to tune the curious harp of man's body.

The folly of one man is the fortune of another for no man prospers so suddenly as by others' errors.

Many a man's strength is in opposition, and when he faileth, he grows out of use.

It is by discourse that men associate and words are imposed according to the apprehension of the vulgar. And therefore the ill and unfit choice of words wonderfully obsesses the understanding. Nor do the definitions or explanations, wherewith in some things learned men are wont to guard and defend themselves, by any means set the matter right. But words plainly force and overrule the understanding, and throw all into confusion, and lead men away into innumerable and inane controversies and fancies.

Money makes a good servant, but a bad master.

Medicine is a science which hath been, as we have said, more professed than laboured, and yet more laboured than advanced the labour having been, in my judgment, rather in a circle than in progression.

Nothing destroyeth authority so much as the unequal and untimely interchange of power pressed too far, and relaxed too much.

Light gains make heavy purses.

No pleasure is comparable to the standing upon the vantage ground of truth.

The worst men often give the best advice.

The great advantages of simulation and dissimulation are three. First to lay asleep opposition and to surprise. For where a man's intentions are published, it is an alarum to call up all that are against them. The second is to reserve a man's self a fair retreat for if a man engage himself, by a manifest declaration, he must go through, or take a fall. The third is, the better to discover the mind of another. For to him that opens himself, men will hardly show themselves adverse but will fair let him go on, and turn their freedom of speech to freedom of thought.

A just fear of an imminent danger, though there be no blow given, is a lawful cause of war

No man is angry that feels not himself hurt.

Riches are a good handmaid, but the worst mistress.

A healthy body is the guestchamber of the soul, a sick, its prison.

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.

There is no worse torture than the torture of laws.

When a judge departs from the letter of the law he becomes a lawbreaker.

Ask a counsel of both times-of the ancient time what is best, and of the latter time what is fittest

For a crowd is not company and faces are but a gallery of pictures and talk but a tinkling cymbal, where there is no love.

Certainly, it is heaven upon earth, to have a mans mind ... turn upon the poles of truth.

Certainly the best works, and of greatest merit for the public, have proceeded from the unmarried, or childless men.

The remedy is worse than the disease.

Discretion in speech is more than eloquence.

That other principle of Lysander, 'That children are to be deceived with comfits, and men with oaths'.

Dreams and predictions ought to serve but for winter talk by the fireside.

A dance is a measured pace, as a verse is a measured speech.

The fortune which nobody sees makes a person happy and unenvied.

Every rod or staff of empire is truly crooked at the top.

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,

To spend too much time in studies is sloth.

Who ever is out of patience is out of possession of their soul.

Truth is so hard to tell, it sometimes needs fiction to make it plausible.

The four pillars of government . . . (which are religion, justice, counsel, and treasure).

I do not believe that any man fears to be dead, but only the stroke of death.

Why should I be angry with a man for loving himself better than me.

All rising to great place is by a winding stair.

Nature is often hidden, sometimes overcome, seldom extinguished.

It is a good point of cunning for a man to shape the answer he would have in his own words and propositions, for it makes the other party stick the less.

Some books are to be tasted others swallowed and some to be chewed and digested.

Discretion of speech is more than eloquence, and to speak agreeably to him with whom we deal is more than to speak in good words, or in good order.

It was prettily devised of Aesop, The fly sat upon the axletree of the chariot-wheel and said, what a dust do I raise.

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

Children sweeten labours, but they make misfortunes more bitter.

If a man be gracious and courteous to strangers, it shows he is a citizen of the world.

All good moral philosophy is but a handmaid to religion.

And as for Mixed Mathematics, I may only make this prediction, that there cannot fail to be more kinds of them, as nature grows further disclosed.

A man cannot speak to his son but as a father, to his wife but as a husband, to his enemy but upon terms whereas a friend may speak as the case requires, and not as it sorteth with the person.