Quotes from Francis Bacon

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

A man who contemplates revenge keeps his wounds green.

It was well said that envy keeps no holidays.

Men possessing minds which are morose, solemn, and inflexible enjoy generally a greater share of dignity than of happiness.

The worst solitude is to be destitute of sincere friendship.

Before I start painting I have a slightly ambiguous feeling: happiness is a special excitement because unhappiness is always possible a moment later. That's like life: it is so precious because death is always beckoning.

The feeling of desperation and unhappiness are more useful to an artist than the feeling of contentment, because desperation and unhappiness stretch your whole sensibility.

Riches are for spending.

Whoever is out of patience is out of possession of his soul.Men must not turn bees, and kill themselves in stinging others.

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.

Men fear death as children fear to go in the dark.

Revenge is a kind of wild justice, which the more a man's nature runs to, the more ought law to weed it out.

They that deny a God destroy man's nobility, for certainly man is of kin to the beasts by his body; and if he be not of kin to God by his spirit, he is a base and ignoble creature.

Ambition is like choler; which is an humor that maketh men active, earnest, full of alacrity, and stirring, if it be not stopped. But if it be stopped, and cannot have his way, it becometh adust, and thereby malign and venomous.

Children sweeten labours, but they make misfortunes more bitter.

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

Base and crafty cowards are like the arrow that flieth in the dark.

Truth ... is the sovereign good of human nature.

The real and legitimate goal of the sciences is the endowment of human life with new commodities.

My essays… come home to men's business and bosoms.

I have taken all knowledge to be my province.

Antiquitas saeculi juventus mundi. These times are the ancient times, when the world is ancient, and not those which we account ancient ordine retrogrado, by a computation backward from ourselves.

Conception, my boy, fundamental brain work, is what makes all the difference in art. The job of the artist is always to deepen the mystery.

A man's nature runs either to herbs, or to weeds; therefore let him seasonably water the one, and destroy the other.