Top 100 Quotes About Francis Bacon
#1. We must start human society from scratch; as Francis Bacon said, we must recreate human understanding.
Nicolas Chamfort
#2. 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
#3. 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
#4. 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
#5. The vices of authority are chiefly four: delays, corruption, roughness and facility. Francis Bacon More
J.D. Robb
#6. There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion. - Francis Bacon, Essays, Civil and Moral, Of Beauty
Scott Westerfeld
#7. All rising to great place is by a winding stair. - Sir Francis Bacon,
Clive Barker
#8. Money is a good servant but a bad master. - SIR FRANCIS BACON
Anthony Robbins
#9. He's already writing the catalog copy in his mind. Dehumanizing distortions, the obliteration of self, with a nod to Francis Bacon or Steven Cohen. Heck, David Bowie. There
Lauren Beukes
#10. The paintings of Francis Bacon to my eye are very beautiful. The paintings of Bosch or Goya are to my eye very beautiful. I've also stood in front of those same paintings with people who've said, 'let's get on to the Botticellis as soon as possible.' I have lingered, of course.
Clive Barker
#11. I remember Francis Bacon would say that he felt he was giving art what he thought it previously lacked. With me, it's what Yeats called the fascination with what's difficult. I'm only trying to do what I can't do.
Lucian Freud
#12. (Francis) Bacon's best known writings are his essays. They are loved for many reasons, such as their being so short.
Richard Armour
#13. Through my friend Tony Shafrazi, who's an art dealer and an artist himself - he helped to show Basquiat and Keith Haring, and has worked with the Francis Bacon estate - it was really through my friendship with Tony that I developed even more of an interest in art.
Owen Wilson
#14. When I criticize Joseph Beuys or Francis Bacon, nobody calls those opinions anti-male. Putting female artists or their subject matter off-limits is itself sexist and limiting.
Jerry Saltz
#15. I love Francis Bacon. I just saw a great Jackson Pollock exhibit at the Dallas Museum when I was home for Thanksgiving.
Owen Wilson
#16. Burleigh, absolutely; and a lot about Elizabeth. I mean I found when I play Henry V a lot of connections with the hidden history of the connection between Francis Bacon and Elizabeth.
Mark Rylance
#17. My early paintings weren't that good - I was very influenced by Francis Bacon. But there was a kind of intensity there. And however influenced they may have been by other people, even my earliest paintings were recognisably my own.
Julian Schnabel
#18. Solomon saith: There is no new thing upon
the earth. So that as Plato had an imagination,
that all knowledge was but remembrance; so
Solomon giveth his sentence, that all novelty is
but oblivion.
Francis Bacon: Essays, LVIII
Jorge Luis Borges
#19. For five years he [Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679)] served as personal secretary to, yes, Francis Bacon. In fact, I've noted over a course of years that the job of a secretary can be utterly fulfilling just in case one's boss happens to be Francis Bacon.
Daniel N. Robinson
#20. I think that was very important to Bacon ... personally. I think he went to great efforts to get a house for the Stratford man, to make it so difficult for us to prove that it was Francis Bacon, because it is very difficult to prove.
Mark Rylance
#21. Francis Bacon somewhere remarks that politeness veils vice just as dress masks wrinkles.
John Doran
#22. Gardening is the purest human pleasure. Francis Bacon
Laura Frantz
#23. Francis Bacon is one of my giant inspirations. I just love him to pieces.
David Lynch
#24. Various different people have inspired me throughout my career. From Francis Bacon to Vassareli, Coco Chanel to Christian Dior, Cecil Beaton, musicians, architects ... the list is endless.
Dries Van Noten
#25. I like Francis Bacon best, because Francis Bacon has terrific problems, and he knows that he is not going to solve them, but he knows also that he can escape from day to day and stay alive, and he does that because his work gives him a kick.
Louise Bourgeois
#26. It's not name dropping, but not many people can say, like me, that they spent the day with the likes of Francis Bacon or that boring drunk Dylan Thomas. You don't forget things like that.
Jeffrey Bernard
#27. I always say Philadelphia, Pennsylvania is my biggest influence. But for painters, I like many, many painters, but I love Francis Bacon the most, and Edward Hopper.
David Lynch
#28. Voltaire once wrote, "Judge a man by his questions rather than his answers." Sir Francis Bacon added, "A prudent question is one-half of wisdom." Indira Gandhi concluded that "the power to question is the basis of all human progress." Great questions are clearly the quickest path to great answers.
Gary Keller
#29. Damien Hirst is the Elvis of the English art world, its ayatollah, deliverer, and big-thinking entrepreneurial potty-mouthed prophet and front man. Hirst synthesizes punk, Pop Art, Jeff Koons, Marcel Duchamp, Francis Bacon, and Catholicism.
Jerry Saltz
#30. Christopher Marlowe or Francis Bacon The author of Lear remains unshaken Willie Herbert or Mary Fitton What does it matter? The Sonnets were written.
Noel Coward
#31. The main importance of Francis Bacon's influence does not lie in any peculiar theory of inductive reasoning which he happened to express, but in the revolt against second-hand information of which he was a leader.
Alfred North Whitehead
#32. But I find with Francis Bacon, some of the things were in the place, and someone who was connected with these schools of thought, and someone who had a motivation that equals the scope of the comedy and the tragedy in the plays.
Mark Rylance
#33. I remember when you used to have your profession on your passport and I always thought that being a painter was the best one to be, because my heroes were Goya and Francis Bacon.
Damien Hirst
#34. Nuptial love makes mankind; friendly love perfects it; but wanton love corrupts and debases it.
Francis Bacon
#35. 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
#36. Death is a friend of ours; and he that is not ready to entertain him is not at home.
Francis Bacon
#37. 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
#38. 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
#39. 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
#40. Great boldness is seldom without some absurdity.
Francis Bacon
#42. All of our actions take their hue from the complexion of the heart, as landscapes their variety from light.
Francis Bacon
#43. He that will not apply new remedies must expect new evils; for time is the greatest innovator.
Francis Bacon
#44. The understanding must not therefore be supplied with wings, but rather hung with weights, to keep it from leaping and flying.
Francis Bacon
#45. Those that want friends to open themselves unto are cannibals of their own hearts.
Francis Bacon
#47. 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
#48. 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
#49. 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
#50. 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
#51. Great riches have sold more men than they have bought.
Francis Bacon
#52. The folly of one man is the fortune of another.
Francis Bacon
#53. Men are rather beholden ... generally to chance or anything else, than to logic, for the invention of arts and sciences.
Francis Bacon
#54. God has two textbooks - Scripture and Creation - we would do well to listen to both.
Francis Bacon
#55. It's all so meaningless, we may as well be extraordinary.
Francis Bacon
#56. They are happy men whose natures sort with their vocations.
Francis Bacon
#57. 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
#59. God Almighty first planted a garden: and indeed it is the purest of human pleasures.
Francis Bacon
#60. 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
#61. 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
#62. 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
#63. 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
#66. Pictures and shapes are but secondary objects and please or displease only in the memory.
Francis Bacon
#68. Prosperity is not without many fears and distastes; and adversity is not without comforts and hopes.
Francis Bacon
#70. Nothing doth more hurt in a state than that cunning men pass for wise.
Francis Bacon
#71. 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
#72. 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
#73. No pleasure is comparable to the standing upon the vantage-ground of truth.
Francis Bacon
#74. Truth is so hard to tell, it sometimes needs fiction to make it plausible.
Francis Bacon
#75. The zeal which begins with hypocrisy must conclude in treachery at first it deceives, at last it betrays
Francis Bacon
#76. The correlative to loving our neighbors as ourselves is hating ourselves as we hate our neighbors.
Francis Bacon
#77. 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
#78. If I sit and daydream, the images rush by like a succession of colored slides.
Francis Bacon
#79. People have discovered that they can fool the devil; but they can't fool the neighbors.
Francis Bacon
#80. There was never law, or sect, or opinion did so much magnify goodness, as the Christian religion doth.
Francis Bacon
#81. It is good discretion not make too much of any man at the first; because one cannot hold out that proportion.
Francis Bacon
#82. 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
#83. 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
#84. Out of monuments, names, words proverbs ... and the like, we do save and recover somewhat from the deluge of time.
Francis Bacon
#85. 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
#86. For no man can forbid the spark nor tell whence it may come.
Francis Bacon
#87. In one and the same fire, clay grows hard and wax melts.
Francis Bacon
#88. 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
#89. 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
#90. Books must follow sciences, and not sciences books.
[Proposition touching Amendment of Laws]
Francis Bacon
#91. 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
#92. 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
#93. 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
#94. It's such an extraordinary supple medium that you never do quite know what paint will do.
Francis Bacon
#95. 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
#96. 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
#97. Men suppose their reason has command over their words; still it happens that words in return exercise authority on reason
Francis Bacon
#98. 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
#100. 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
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