Top 500 Francis Bacon Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “Champagne for my real friends, real pain for my sham friends.”

— Francis Bacon

52. “Fortune is like the market, where, many times, if you can stay a little, the price will fall.”

— Francis Bacon

53. “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

54. “I will never be an old man. To me, old age is always 15 years older than I am.”

— Francis Bacon

55. “Seek ye first the good things of the mind, and the rest will either be supplied or its loss will not be felt.”

— Francis Bacon

56. “If a man be gracious and courteous to strangers, it shows he is a citizen of the world.”

— Francis Bacon

57. “Truth is a naked and open daylight.”

— Francis Bacon

58. “A bachelor’s life is a fine breakfast, a flat lunch, and a miserable dinner.”

— Francis Bacon

59. “For a crowd is not company; and faces are but a gallery of pictures; and talk but a tinkling cymbal, where there is no love.”

— Francis Bacon

60. “Life is a marshmallow, easy to chew but hard to swallow.”

— Francis Bacon

61. “Truth is so hard to tell, it sometimes needs fiction to make it plausible.”

— Francis Bacon

62. “Art is man added to Nature.”

— Francis Bacon

63. “Wives are young men’s mistresses, companions for middle age, and old men’s nurses.”

— Francis Bacon

64. “There is superstition in avoiding superstition.”

— Francis Bacon

65. “The greatest trust between man and man is the trust of giving counsel.”

— Francis Bacon

66. “It is a sad fate for a man to die too well known to everybody else, and still unknown to himself.”

— Francis Bacon

67. “The wonder of a single snowflake outweighs the wisdom of a million meteorologists.”

— Francis Bacon

68. “Everybody has his own interpretation of a painting he sees...”

— Francis Bacon

69. “Half of science is putting forth the right questions.”

— Francis Bacon

70. “Truth emerges more readily from error than from confusion.”

— Francis Bacon

71. “Nothing is to be feared but fear itself. Nothing grievous but to yield to grief.”

— Francis Bacon

72. “The greatest vicissitude of things amongst men, is the vicissitude of sects and religions.”

— Francis Bacon

73. “Parents who wish to train up their children in the way they should go must go in the way in which they would have their children go.”

— Francis Bacon

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

— Francis Bacon

75. “The job of the artist is always to deepen the mystery.”

— Francis Bacon

76. “To seek to extinguish anger utterly is but a bravery of the Stoics. We have better oracles: ‘Be angry, but sin not.’ ‘Let not the sun go down upon your wrath.’”

— Francis Bacon

77. “Silence is the virtue of fools.”

— Francis Bacon

78. “The folly of one man is the fortune of another.”

— Francis Bacon

79. “Men fear death as children fear to go in the dark; and as that natural fear in children is increased by tales, so is the other.”

— Francis Bacon

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

— Francis Bacon

81. “In taking revenge, a man is but even with his enemy; but in passing it over, he is superior.”

— Francis Bacon

82. “A man that studieth revenge keeps his own wounds green.”

— Francis Bacon

83. “It is the peculiar and perpetual error of the human understanding to be more moved and excited by affirmatives than by negatives.”

— Francis Bacon

84. “When I paint I am ageless, I just have the pleasure or the difficulty of painting.”

— Francis Bacon

85. “Men in great place are thrice servants: servants of the sovereign or state, servants of fame, and servants of business.”

— Francis Bacon

86. “A principal fruit of friendship, is the ease and discharge of the fullness and swellings of the heart, which passions of all kinds do cause and induce.”

— Francis Bacon

87. “There are two books laid before us to study, to prevent our falling into error; first, the volume of the Scriptures, which reveal the will of God; then the volume of the Creatures, which express His power.”

— Francis Bacon

88. “Houses are built to live in, and not to look on: therefore let use be preferred before uniformity.”

— Francis Bacon

89. “A much talking judge is an ill-tuned cymbal.”

— Francis Bacon

90. “Truth can never be reached by just listening to the voice of an authority.”

— Francis Bacon

91. “It would be unsound fancy and self-contradictory to expect that things which have never yet been done can be done except by means which have never yet been tried.”

— Francis Bacon

92. “There is no comparison between that which is lost by not succeeding and that which is lost by not trying.”

— Francis Bacon

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

— Francis Bacon

94. “It is impossible to love and to be wise.”

— Francis Bacon

95. “God has, in fact, written two books, not just one. Of course, we are all familiar with the first book he wrote, namely Scripture. But he has written a second book called creation.”

— Francis Bacon

96. “We cannot command Nature except by obeying her.”

— Francis Bacon

97. “It is natural to die as to be born.”

— Francis Bacon

98. “The way of fortune is like the milkyway in the sky; which is a number of small stars, not seen asunder, but giving light together: so it is a number of little and scarce discerned virtues, or rather faculties and customs, that make men fortunate.”

— Francis Bacon

99. “Laws and Institutions Must Go Hand in Hand with the Progress of the Human Mind.”

— Francis Bacon

100. “If the hill will not come to Mahomet, Mahomet will go to the hill.”

— Francis Bacon