Inspiring Quotes by Francis Bacon
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It is the wisdom of the crocodiles, that shed tears when they would devour.

I don't believe art is available; it's rare and curious and should be completely isolated; one is more aware of its magic the more it is isolated.

The less people speak of their greatness, the more we think of it.

For all knowledge and wonder (which is the seed of knowledge) is an impression of pleasure in itself.

Ill Fortune never crushed that man whom good fortune deceived not.

Riches are for spending, and spending for honor and good actions; therefore extraordinary expense must be limited by the worth of the occasion.

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

Men seem neither to understand their riches nor their strength. Of the former they believe greater things than they should; of the latter, less.

Certainly man is of kin to the beasts by his body; and if he be not kin to God by his spirit, he is a base and ignoble creature.

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

Truth can never be reached by just listening to the voice of an authority.

Lukewarm persons think they may accommodate points of religion by middle ways and witty reconcilements, -- as if they would make an arbitrament between God and man.

Since custom is the principal magistrate of man's life, let men by all means endeavor to obtain good customs.

Custom is the principle magistrate of man's life.

Very few people have a natural feeling for painting, and so, of course, they naturally think that painting is an expression of the artist's mood. But it rarely is. Very often he may be in greatest despair and be painting his happiest paintings.

Atheism leaves a man to sense, to philosophy, to natural piety, to laws, to reputation, all which may be guides to an outward moral virtue, though religion were not; but superstition dismounts all these, and erects an absolute monarchy in the minds of men.

Brutes by their natural instinct have produced many discoveries, whereas men by discussion and the conclusions of reason have given birth to few or none.

I'll follow, as they say, for reward. He that rewards me, God reward him. If I do grow great, I'll grow less; for I'll purge, and leave sack, and live cleanly, as a nobleman should do.

All of our actions take their hue from the complexion of the heart, as landscapes their variety from light.

Even within the most beautiful landscape, in the trees, under the leaves the insects are eating each other; violence is a part of life.

I hold every man a debtor to his profession; from the which as men of course do seek to receive countenance and profit, so ought they of duty to endeavor themselves, by way of amends, to be a help and ornament thereunto.

If my people look as if they're in a dreadful fix, it's because I can't get them out of a technical dilemma.

But the images of men's wits and knowledges remain in books, exempted from the wrong of time, and capable of perpetual renovation.

It is a poore Center of a Mans Actions, Himselfe.

The logic now in use serves rather to fix and give stability to the errors which have their foundation in commonly received notions than to help the search for truth. So it does more harm than good.

Books must follow sciences, and not sciences books.

Libraries are as the shrine where all the relics of the ancient saints, full of true virtue, and that without delusion or imposture, are preserved and reposed.

The stage is more beholding to love than the life of man. For as to the stage, love is ever matter of comedies and now and then of tragedies; but in life it doth much mischief, sometimes like a Siren, sometimes like a Fury.

Crafty men condemn studies; Simple men admire them; And wise men use them: For they teach not their own use: but that is a wisdom without them, and above them, won by observation.

We rise to great heights by a winding staircase of small steps.

Truth comes out of error more readily than out of confusion.

Men in great place are thrice servants: servants of the sovereign or state, servants of fame, and servants of business.

The voice of the people has about it something divine: for how otherwise can so many heads agree together as one?

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.

Those herbs which perfume the air most delightfully, not passed by as the rest, but, being trodden upon and crushed, are three; that is, burnet, wild thyme and watermints. Therefore, you are to set whole alleys of them, to have the pleasure when you walk or tread.

So that every wand or staff of empire is forsooth curved at top.

The nature of things betrays itself more readily under the vexations of art than in its natural freedom.

Without friends the world is but a wilderness.

As is the garden such is the gardener. A man's nature runs either to herbs or weeds.

Science is the labor and handicraft of the mind.

They are happy men whose natures sort with their vocations.

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

The mystery lies in the irrationality by which you make appearance -- if it is not irrational, you make illustration.

Men leave their riches either to their kindred or their friends, and moderate portions prosper best in both.

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.

The human understanding is no dry light, but receives an infusion from the will and affections... What a man had rather were true he more readily believes.

To be free minded and cheerfully disposed at hours of meat and sleep and of exercise is one of the best precepts of long lasting.

Nothing destroys authority more than the unequal and untimely interchange of power stretched too far and relaxed too much.

Nothing opens the heart like a true friend, to whom you may impart griefs, joys, fears, hopes...and whatever lies upon the heart.

Innovations, which are the births of time.

He that hath a wife and children hath given hostages to fortune.

The human understanding is like a false mirror, which, receiving rays irregularly, distorts and discolors the nature of things by mingling its own nature with it.

Painting is the pattern of one's own nervous system being projected on canvas.

Great art is deeply ordered. Even if within the order there may be enormously instinctive and accidental things, nevertheless they come out of a desire for ordering and for returning fact onto the nervous system in a more violent way.

Some paint comes across directly onto the nervous system and other paint tells you the story in a long diatribe through the brain.

Let the mind be enlarged... to the grandeur of the mysteries, and not the mysteries contracted to the narrowness of the mind.

Every person born in the USA is endowed with life, liberty, and a substantial share of the national debt.

All good moral philosophy is ... but the handmaid to religion.

There arises from a bad and unapt formation of words a wonderful obstruction to the mind.

The essential form of knowledge... is nothing but a representation of truth: for the truth of being and the truth of knowing are one, differing no more than the direct beam and the beam reflected.

Great art is always a way of concentrating, reinventing what is called fact, what we know of our existence- a reconcentration… tearing away the veils, the attitudes people acquire of their time and earlier time. Really good artists tear down those veils.

I confess that I have as vast contemplative ends, as I have moderate civil ends: for I have taken all knowledge to be my province.

Then bless thy secret growth, nor catch At noise, but thrive unseen and dumb; Keep clean, be as fruit, earn life, and watch, Till the white-wing'd reapers come.

No body can be healthful without exercise, neither natural body nor politic, and certainly, to a kingdom or estate, a just and honourable war is the true exercise.

A principal fruit of friendship, is the ease and discharge of the fullness and swellings of the heart, which passions of all kinds do cause and induce.

First the amendment of their own minds. For the removal of the impediments of the mind will sooner clear the passages of fortune than the obtaining fortune will remove the impediments of the mind.

Images also help me find and realise ideas. I look at hundreds of very different, contrasting images and I pinch details from them, rather like people who eat from other people's plates.

Judges ought to be more learned, than witty, more reverend, than plausible, and more advised, than confident. Above all things, integrity is their portion and proper virtue.

The human understanding of its own nature is prone to suppose the existence of more order and regularity in the world than it finds.

Anger is certainly a kind of baseness, as it appears well in the weakness of those subjects in whom it reigns: children, women, old folks, sick folks.

The lame man who keeps the right road outstrips the runner who takes the wrong one.

Knowledge hath in it somewhat of the serpent, and therefore where it entereth into a man it makes him swell.

The serpent if it wants to become the dragon must eat itself.

Men ought to find the difference between saltiness and bitterness. Certainly, he that hath a satirical vein, as he maketh others afraid of his wit, so he had need be afraid of others' memory.

A man were better relate himself to a statue or picture than to suffer his thoughts to pass in smother.

Spouses are great impediments to great enterprises.

If I sit and daydream, the images rush by like a succession of colored slides.