Top 500 Francis Bacon Quotes (2024 Update)
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351. “Philosophy when superficially studied, excites doubt, when thoroughly explored, it dispels it.”

— Francis Bacon

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

— Francis Bacon

353. “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

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

— Francis Bacon

355. “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

356. “Books speak plain when counselors blanch.”

— Francis Bacon

357. “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

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

— Francis Bacon

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

— Francis Bacon

360. “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.”

— Francis Bacon

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

— Francis Bacon

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

— Francis Bacon

363. “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

364. “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

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

— Francis Bacon

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

— Francis Bacon

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

— Francis Bacon

368. “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

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

— Francis Bacon

370. “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

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

— Francis Bacon

372. “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

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

— Francis Bacon

374. “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

375. “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

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

— Francis Bacon

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

— Francis Bacon

378. “If in other sciences we should arrive at certainty without doubt and truth without error, it behooves us to place the foundations of knowledge in mathematics.”

— Francis Bacon

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

— Francis Bacon

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

— Francis Bacon

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

— Francis Bacon

382. “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

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

— Francis Bacon

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

— Francis Bacon

385. “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

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

— Francis Bacon

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

— Francis Bacon

388. “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

389. “Great Hypocrites are the real atheists.”

— Francis Bacon

390. “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

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

— Francis Bacon

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

— Francis Bacon

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

— Francis Bacon

394. “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

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

— Francis Bacon

396. “Painting gave meaning to my life which without it would not have had.”

— Francis Bacon

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

— Francis Bacon

398. “For what a man would like to be true, that he more readily believes.”

— Francis Bacon

399. “The cord breaketh at last by the weakest pull.”

— Francis Bacon

400. “The best preservative to keep the mind in health is the faithful admonition of a friend.”

— Francis Bacon