Quotes from Francis Bacon

A man that is young in years may be old in hours if he have lost no time.

By far the best proof is experience.

He that gives good advice, builds with one hand; he that gives good counsel and example, builds with both; but he that gives good admonition and bad example, builds with one hand and pulls down with the other.

There Are But Two Tragedies in Life-One is One's Inability to attain One's Heart's Desire-The Other Is To Have It!

Truth is the daughter of time, not of authority.

They are ill discoverers that think there is no land, when they can see nothing but sea.

For friends... do but look upon good Books: they are true friends, that will neither flatter nor dissemble.

Natural abilities are like natural plants; they need pruning by study.

A Man must make his opportunity,as oft as find it

Travel, in the younger sort, is a part of education; in the elder, a part of experience. He that travelleth into a country before he hath some entrance into the language, goeth to school, and not to travel.

To spend too much time in studies is sloth; to use them too much for ornament, is affectation; to make judgment wholly by their rules, is the humor of a scholar

If a man is gracious and courteous to strangers, it shows that he is a citizen of the world.

For no man can forbid the spark nor tell whence it may come.

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.

If money be not thy servant, it will be thy master. The covetous man cannot so properly be said to possess wealth, as that may be said to possess him.

The surest way to prevent seditions...is to take away the matter of them.

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.

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

Books must follow sciences, and not sciences books." [ Proposition touching Amendment of Laws ]

He that hath wife and children hath given hostages to fortune; for they are impediments to great enterprises, either of virtue or mischief.

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

This is certain, that a man that studieth revenge keeps his wounds green, which otherwise would heal and do well.

Men fear death as children fear to go into the dark and as that natural fear in children is increased with tales, so is the other

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.