Top 500 Francis Bacon Quotes (2025 Update)
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351. “Some paint comes across directly onto the nervous system and other paint tells you the story in a long diatribe through the brain.”

— Francis Bacon

352. “Jesus would have been one of the best photographers that ever existed. He was always looking at the beauty of people souls. In fact Jesus was constantly making pictures of God in people’s life by looking at their souls and exposing them to his light.”

— Francis Bacon

353. “Perils commonly ask to be paid in pleasures.”

— Francis Bacon

354. “If you dissemble sometimes your knowledge of that you are thought to know, you shall be thought, another time, to know that you know not.”

— Francis Bacon

355. “Again there is another great and powerful cause why the sciences have made but little progress; which is this. It is not possible to run a course aright when the goal itself has not been rightly placed.”

— Francis Bacon

356. “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.”

— Francis Bacon

357. “The colors that show best by candlelight are white, carnation, and a kind of sea-water green.”

— Francis Bacon

358. “A forbidden writing is thought to be a certain spark of truth, that flies up in the face of them who seek to tread it out.”

— Francis Bacon

359. “Nothing is to be feared but fear.”

— Francis Bacon

360. “I do not believe that any man fears to be dead, but only the stroke of death.”

— Francis Bacon

361. “He that toucheth pitch shall be defiled therewith.”

— Francis Bacon

362. “I had rather believe all the Fables in the Legend, and the Talmud, and the Alcoran, than that this universal frame is without a Mind.”

— Francis Bacon

363. “The mystery lies in the irrationality by which you make appearance – if it is not irrational, you make illustration.”

— Francis Bacon

364. “I should have been, I don’t know, a con-man, a robber or a prostitute. But it was vanity that made me choose painting, vanity and chance.”

— Francis Bacon

365. “He who desires solitude is either an animal or a god.”

— Francis Bacon

366. “Liberty of speech invites and provokes liberty to be used again, and so bringeth much to a man’s knowledge.”

— Francis Bacon

367. “Riches are a good hand maiden, but a poor mistress.”

— Francis Bacon

368. “For first of all we must prepare a Natural and Experimental History, sufficient and good; and this is the foundation of all; for we are not to imagine or suppose, but to discover, what nature does or may be made to do.”

— Francis Bacon

369. “For my name and memory I leave to men’s charitable speeches, and to foreign nations and the next ages.”

— Francis Bacon

370. “The pencil of the Holy Ghost hath labored more in describing the afflictions of Job than the felicities of Solomon.”

— Francis Bacon

371. “Picasso is the reason why I paint. He is the father figure, who gave me the wish to paint.”

— Francis Bacon

372. “There is no doubt but men of genius and leisure may carry our method to greater perfection, but, having had long experience, we have found none equal to it for the commodiousness it affords in working with the Understanding.”

— Francis Bacon

373. “Deformed persons commonly take revenge on nature.”

— Francis Bacon

374. “Seek not proud riches, but such as thou mayest get justly, use soberly, distribute cheerfully, and leave contentedly.”

— Francis Bacon

375. “We are much beholden to Machiavel and others, that write what men do, and not what they ought to do.”

— Francis Bacon

376. “The genius of any single man can no more equal learning, than a private purse hold way with the exchequer.”

— Francis Bacon

377. “I foresee it and yet I hardly ever carry it out as I foresee it. It transforms itself by the actual paint. I don’t in fact know very often what the paint will do, and it does many things which are very much better than I could make it do.”

— Francis Bacon

378. “Hope is the most beneficial of all the affections, and doth much to the prolongation of life...”

— Francis Bacon

379. “The French are wiser than they seem, and the Spaniards seem wiser than they are.”

— Francis Bacon

380. “Lies are sufficient to breed opinion, and opinion brings on substance.”

— Francis Bacon

381. “No man’s fortune can be an end worthy of his being.”

— Francis Bacon

382. “When a doubt is once received, men labour rather how to keep it a doubt still, than how to solve it; and accordingly bend their wits.”

— Francis Bacon

383. “I have often thought upon death, and I find it the least of all evils.”

— Francis Bacon

384. “When a man laughs at his troubles he loses a great many friends. They never forgive the loss of their prerogative.”

— Francis Bacon

385. “There is no man doth a wrong for the wrong’s sake; but thereby to purchase himself profit, or pleasure, or honour, or the like. There, why should I be angry with a man for loving himself better than me? And if any man should do wrong merely out of ill nature, why, yet it is but like the thorn or briar, which prick and scratch, because they can do no other.”

— Francis Bacon

386. “Of all things known to mortals wine is the most powerful and effectual for exciting and inflaming the passions of mankind, being common fuel to them all.”

— Francis Bacon

387. “I’m just trying to make images as accurately as possible off my nervous system as I can.”

— Francis Bacon

388. “There is no greater wisdom than well to time the beginnings and onsets of things.”

— Francis Bacon

389. “Truth is a good dog; but always beware of barking too close to the heels of an error, lest you get your brains kicked out.”

— Francis Bacon

390. “Hurl your calumnies boldly; something is sure to stick.”

— Francis Bacon

391. “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

392. “It is as hard and severe a thing to be a true politician as to be truly moral.”

— Francis Bacon

393. “Men suppose their reason has command over their words; still it happens that words in return exercise authority on reason.”

— Francis Bacon

394. “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

395. “An illustrational form tells you through the intelligence immediately what the form is about, whereas a non-illustrational form works first upon sensation and then slowly leaks back into the fact.”

— Francis Bacon

396. “In mathematics I can report no deficiency, except it be that men do not sufficiently understand the excellent use of Pure Mathematics.”

— Francis Bacon

397. “Riches are for spending.”

— Francis Bacon

398. “They that reverence to much old times are but a scorn to the new.”

— Francis Bacon

399. “One always starts work with the subject, no matter how tenuous it is, and one constructs an artificial structure by which one can trap the reality of the subject-matter that one has started from.”

— Francis Bacon

400. “Rebellions of the belly are the worst.”

— Francis Bacon