Top 100 Bacon Francis Quotes
#1. Nuptial love makes mankind; friendly love perfects it; but wanton love corrupts and debases it.
Francis Bacon
#2. The general root of superstition : namely, that men observe when things hit, and not when they miss; and commit to memory the one, and forget and pass over the other.
Francis Bacon
#3. Death is a friend of ours; and he that is not ready to entertain him is not at home.
Francis Bacon
#4. It is madness and a contradiction to expect that things which were never yet performed should be effected, except by means hitherto untried.
Francis Bacon
#5. We gave ourselves for lost men, and prepared for death. Yet we did lift up our hearts and voices to God above, who "showeth His wonders in the deep".
Francis Bacon
#6. They are the best physicians, who being great in learning most incline to the traditions of experience, or being distinguished in practice do not reflect the methods and generalities of art.
Francis Bacon
#7. Great boldness is seldom without some absurdity.
Francis Bacon
#9. All of our actions take their hue from the complexion of the heart, as landscapes their variety from light.
Francis Bacon
#10. He that will not apply new remedies must expect new evils; for time is the greatest innovator.
Francis Bacon
#11. The understanding must not therefore be supplied with wings, but rather hung with weights, to keep it from leaping and flying.
Francis Bacon
#12. Those that want friends to open themselves unto are cannibals of their own hearts.
Francis Bacon
#14. I have to hope that my instincts will do the right thing, because I can't erase what I have done. And if I drew something first, then my paintings would be illustrations of drawings.
Francis Bacon
#15. 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
Francis Bacon
#16. By this means we presume we have established for ever, a true and legitimate marriage between the Empirical and Rational faculty; whose fastidious and unfortunate divorce and separation hath troubled and disordered the whole race and generation of mankind.
Francis Bacon
#17. It is the true office of history to represent the events themselves, together with the counsels, and to leave the observations and conclusions thereupon to the liberty and faculty of every man's judgment
Francis Bacon
#18. Great riches have sold more men than they have bought.
Francis Bacon
#19. The folly of one man is the fortune of another.
Francis Bacon
#20. Men are rather beholden ... generally to chance or anything else, than to logic, for the invention of arts and sciences.
Francis Bacon
#21. God has two textbooks - Scripture and Creation - we would do well to listen to both.
Francis Bacon
#22. It's all so meaningless, we may as well be extraordinary.
Francis Bacon
#23. They are happy men whose natures sort with their vocations.
Francis Bacon
#24. If you want to convey fact, this can only ever be done through a form of distortion. You must distort to transform what is called appearance into image.
Francis Bacon
#26. God Almighty first planted a garden: and indeed it is the purest of human pleasures.
Francis Bacon
#27. The person is a poor judge who by an action can be disgraced more in failing than they can be honored in succeeding.
Francis Bacon
#28. The light that a man receives by counsel from another is drier and purer than that which comes from his own understanding and judgment, which is ever infused and drenched in his affections and customs.
Francis Bacon
#29. But I account the use that a man should seek of the publishing of his own writings before his death, to be but an untimely anticipation of that which is proper to follow a man, and not to go along with him.
Francis Bacon
#30. 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.
Francis Bacon
#33. We must start human society from scratch; as Francis Bacon said, we must recreate human understanding.
Nicolas Chamfort
#34. Pictures and shapes are but secondary objects and please or displease only in the memory.
Francis Bacon
#36. Prosperity is not without many fears and distastes; and adversity is not without comforts and hopes.
Francis Bacon
#38. Nothing doth more hurt in a state than that cunning men pass for wise.
Francis Bacon
#39. The human understanding when it has once adopted an opinion (either as being the received opinion or as being agreeable to itself) draws all things else to support and agree with it.
Francis Bacon
#40. There is a cunning which we in England call "the turning of the cat" in the pan; which is, when that which a man says to another, he says it as if another had said it to him.
Francis Bacon
#41. No pleasure is comparable to the standing upon the vantage-ground of truth.
Francis Bacon
#42. Truth is so hard to tell, it sometimes needs fiction to make it plausible.
Francis Bacon
#43. The zeal which begins with hypocrisy must conclude in treachery at first it deceives, at last it betrays
Francis Bacon
#44. The correlative to loving our neighbors as ourselves is hating ourselves as we hate our neighbors.
Francis Bacon
#45. The partitions of knowledge are not like several lines that meet in one angle, and so touch not in a point; but are like branches of a tree, that meet in a stem, which hath a dimension and quantity of entireness and continuance, before it come to discontinue and break itself into arms and boughs.
Francis Bacon
#46. If I sit and daydream, the images rush by like a succession of colored slides.
Francis Bacon
#47. People have discovered that they can fool the devil; but they can't fool the neighbors.
Francis Bacon
#48. There was never law, or sect, or opinion did so much magnify goodness, as the Christian religion doth.
Francis Bacon
#49. It is good discretion not make too much of any man at the first; because one cannot hold out that proportion.
Francis Bacon
#50. All artists are vain, they long to be recognized and to leave something to posterity. They want to be loved, and at the same time they want to be free. But nobody is free.
Francis Bacon
#51. 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.
Francis Bacon
#52. Out of monuments, names, words proverbs ... and the like, we do save and recover somewhat from the deluge of time.
Francis Bacon
#53. Judges ought above all to remember the conclusion of the Roman Twelve Tables :The supreme law of all is the weal [weatlh/ well-being] of the people.
Francis Bacon
#54. You cannot just be working in a vast, air-conditioned loft space and think you are going to make a decent painting. Francis Bacon had a special studio built, and he felt completely emasculated in there. I have to be somewhere comfortable.
Peter Doig
#55. For no man can forbid the spark nor tell whence it may come.
Francis Bacon
#56. In one and the same fire, clay grows hard and wax melts.
Francis Bacon
#57. The noblest works and foundations have proceeded from childless men, which have sought to express the image of their minds, where those of their bodies have failed. So the care of posterity is most in them that they have no posterity.
Francis Bacon
#58. There was never miracle wrought by God to convert an atheist, because the light of nature might have led him to confess a God.
Francis Bacon
#59. Books must follow sciences, and not sciences books.
[Proposition touching Amendment of Laws]
Francis Bacon
#60. 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.
Francis Bacon
#61. The cause and root of nearly all evils in the sciences is this-that while we falsely admire and extol the powers of the human mind we neglect to seek for its true helps.
Francis Bacon
#62. For whatever deserves to exist deserves also to be known, for knowledge is the image of existence, and things mean and splendid exist alike.
Francis Bacon
#63. It's such an extraordinary supple medium that you never do quite know what paint will do.
Francis Bacon
#64. To spend too much time in them [studying] is sloth, to use them too much for ornament is affectation, to make judgment wholly by their rules is the humor* of a scholar ... .
Francis Bacon
#65. The doctrines of religion are resolved into carefulness; carefulness into vigorousness; vigorousness into guiltlessness; guiltlessness into abstemiousness; abstemiousness into cleanliness; cleanliness into godliness.
Francis Bacon
#66. When a friend told Francis Bacon that he would prefer not to have an eternal soul than to live in eternal torment, the painter replied with a grim realism that people are so attracted to their egos that they'd probably rather have the torment than simple annihilation.
Os Guinness
#67. Sir Francis Bacon observed that a well-written book, compared with its rivals and antagonists, is like Moses' serpent, that immediately swallowed up and devoured those of the Egyptians.
Joseph Addison
#68. Men suppose their reason has command over their words; still it happens that words in return exercise authority on reason
Francis Bacon
#69. Men seem neither to understand their riches nor their strength. Of the former they believe greater things than they should; of the latter, less.
Francis Bacon
#71. Velazquez found the perfect balance between the ideal illustration which he was required to produce, and the overwhelming emotion he aroused in the spectator.
Francis Bacon
#72. Young people are fitter to invent than to judge; fitter for execution than for counsel; and more fit for new projects than for settled business.
Francis Bacon
#73. Even within the most beautiful landscape, in the trees, under the leaves the insects are eating each other; violence is a part of life.
Francis Bacon
#74. 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.
Francis Bacon
#75. Certainly, it is heaven upon earth, to have a man's mind move in charity, rest in providence, and turn upon the poles of truth.
Francis Bacon
#76. It is a poore Center of a Mans Actions, Himselfe.
Francis Bacon
#77. It is nothing won to admit men with an open door, and to receive them with a shut and reserved countenance.
Francis Bacon
#78. The vices of authority are chiefly four: delays, corruption, roughness and facility. Francis Bacon More
J.D. Robb
#79. For the mind of man is far from the nature of a clear and equal glass, wherein the beams of things should reflect according to their true incidence; nay, it is rather like an enchanted glass, full of superstition and imposture, if it be not delivered and reduced.
Francis Bacon
#80. 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.
Francis Bacon
#81. Picasso is the reason why I paint. He is the father figure, who gave me the wish to paint.
Francis Bacon
#82. If a man be gracious and courteous to strangers, it shows he is a citizen of the world.
Francis Bacon
#83. Judges must beware of hard constructions and strained inferences, for there is no worse torture than that of laws.
Francis Bacon
#84. Painting gave meaning to my life which without it would not have had
Francis Bacon
#85. We must see whether the same clock with weights will go faster at the top of a mountain or at the bottom of a mine; it is probable, if the pull of the weights decreases on the mountain and increases in the mine, that the earth has real attraction.
Francis Bacon
#86. The less people speak of their greatness, the more we think of it.
Francis Bacon
#87. He that seeketh victory over his nature, let him not set himself too great, nor too small tasks; for the first will make him dejected by often failings; and the second will make him a small proceeder, though often by prevailings.
Francis Bacon
#88. Nupital love maketh mankind; friendly love perfecteth it; but wanton love corrupteth, and embaseth it.
Francis Bacon
#89. He who desires solitude is either an animal or a god.
Francis Bacon
#90. I've had photographs taken for portraits because I very much prefer working from the photographs than from models ... I couldn't attempt to do a portrait from photographs of somebody I didn't know ...
Francis Bacon
#91. But we are not dedicating or building any Capitol or Pyramid to human Pride, but found a holy temple in the human Intellect, on the model of the Universe ... For whatever is worthy of Existence is worthy of Knowledge-which is the Image (or Echo) of Existence.
Francis Bacon
#92. Learning hath his infancy, when it is but beginning and almost childish; then his youth, when it is luxuriant and juvenile; then his strength of years, when it is solid and reduced; and lastly his old age, when it waxeth dry and exhaust.
Francis Bacon
#94. Praise from the common people is generally false, and rather follows the vain than the virtuous.
Francis Bacon
#95. Many a man's strength is in opposition, and when he faileth, he grows out of use.
Francis Bacon
#96. Nothing is pleasant that is not spiced with variety.
Francis Bacon
#97. Let the mind be enlarged ... to the grandeur of the mysteries, and not the mysteries contracted to the narrowness of the mind
Francis Bacon
#98. There are many wise men that have secret hearts and transparent countenances.
Francis Bacon
#99. The eye of 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
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