FRANCIS BACON QUOTES IV

English philosopher (1561-1626)

We cannot command nature except by obeying her.

FRANCIS BACON

Novum Organum

Tags: nature


The human understanding is moved by those things most which strike and enter the mind simultaneously and suddenly, and so fill the imagination; and then it feigns and supposes all other things to be somehow, though it cannot see how, similar to those few things by which it is surrounded.

FRANCIS BACON

Novum Organum

Tags: understanding


Wise judges have prescribed that men may not rashly believe the confessions of witches, nor the evidence against them; for the witches themselves are imaginative; and people are credulous, and ready to impute accidents to witchcraft.

FRANCIS BACON

Natural History

Tags: witchcraft


Knowledge is power.

FRANCIS BACON

Meditationes Sacrae

Tags: knowledge


The monuments of wit survive the monuments of power.

FRANCIS BACON

Essex's Device

Tags: wit


God Almighty first planted a garden; and, indeed, it is the purest of human pleasures.

FRANCIS BACON

Essays

Tags: gardening


All colours will agree in the dark.

FRANCIS BACON

Essays

Tags: color


As the births of living creatures at first are ill-shapen, so are all innovations, which are the births of time.

FRANCIS BACON

Essays

Tags: innovation


Wives are young men's mistresses, companions for middle age, and old men's nurses.

FRANCIS BACON

Essays

Tags: marriage


Chiefly the mould of a man's fortune is in his own hands.

FRANCIS BACON

Essays

Tags: fortune


Nobility of birth commonly abateth industry.

FRANCIS BACON

Essays

Tags: nobility


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

FRANCIS BACON

Essays

Tags: beauty


A little philosophy inclineth man's mind to atheism, but depth in philosophy bringeth men's minds about to religion.

FRANCIS BACON

Essays

Tags: philosophy


Prosperity is the blessing of the Old Testament, adversity is the blessing of the New.

FRANCIS BACON

Essays

Tags: adversity


A man would die, though he were neither valiant nor miserable, only upon a weariness to do the same thing so oft over and over.

FRANCIS BACON

Essays


Nothing doth so much keep men out of the Church, and drive men out of the Church, as breach of unity.

FRANCIS BACON

Essays

Tags: church


It is not the lie that passeth through the mind, but the lie that sinketh in, and settleth in it, that doth the hurt.

FRANCIS BACON

Essays

Tags: lying


There is in man's nature a secret inclination and motion towards love of others, which, if it be not spent upon some one or a few, doth naturally spread itself towards many, and maketh men become humane and charitable, as it is seen sometimes in friars. Nuptial love maketh mankind, friendly love perfecteth it, but wanton love corrupteth and embaseth it.

FRANCIS BACON

Essays

Tags: love


Good thoughts, though God accept them, yet towards men are little better than good dreams, except they be put in act.

FRANCIS BACON

Essays

Tags: thought


If a man be gracious and courteous to strangers, it shows he is a citizen of the world, and that his heart is no island cut off from other lands, but a continent that joins them.

FRANCIS BACON

Essays

Tags: courtesy