Top 500 Francis Bacon Quotes (2025 Update)
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401. “Hurl your calumnies boldly; something is sure to stick.”

— Francis Bacon

402. “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

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

— Francis Bacon

404. “There is a cunning which we in England call “the turning of the cat” in the pan; which is, when that which a man says to another, he says it as if another had said it to him.”

— Francis Bacon

405. “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

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

— Francis Bacon

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

— Francis Bacon

408. “Riches are for spending.”

— Francis Bacon

409. “Who ever is out of patience is out of possession of their soul.”

— Francis Bacon

410. “There is as much difference between the counsel that a friend giveth, and that a man giveth himself, as there is between the counsel of a friend and of a flatterer. For there is no such flatterer as is a man’s self.”

— Francis Bacon

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

— Francis Bacon

412. “Judges ought to be more leaned than witty, more reverent than plausible, and more advised than confident. Above all things, integrity is their portion and proper virtue.”

— Francis Bacon

413. “God’s first creature, which was light.”

— Francis Bacon

414. “There is nothing makes a man suspect much, more than to know little.”

— Francis Bacon

415. “There is a wisdom in this beyond the rules of physic: a man’s own observation what he finds good of and what he finds hurt of is the best physic to preserve health.”

— Francis Bacon

416. “But the images of men’s wits and knowledges remain in books, exempted from the wrong of time, and capable of perpetual renovation.”

— Francis Bacon

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

— Francis Bacon

418. “It cannot be denied that outward accidents conduce much to fortune, favor, opportunity, death of others, occasion fitting virtue; but chiefly, the mold of a man’s fortune is in his own hands.”

— Francis Bacon

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

— Francis Bacon

420. “Knowledge hath in it somewhat of the serpent, and therefore where it entereth into a man it makes him swell.”

— Francis Bacon

421. “They who derive their worth from their ancestors resemble potatoes, the most valuable part of which is underground.”

— Francis Bacon

422. “He was reputed one of the wise men that made answer to the question when a man should marry? ‘A young man not yet, an elder man not at all.’”

— Francis Bacon

423. “Nay, number itself in armies importeth not much, where the people is of weak courage; for, as Virgil saith, It never troubles the wolf how many the sheep be.”

— Francis Bacon

424. “Nothing doth so much keep men out of the Church, and drive men out of the Church, as breach of unity.”

— Francis Bacon

425. “Ask counsel of both timesof the ancient time what is best, and of the latter time what is fittest.”

— Francis Bacon

426. “Whatever you can, count.”

— Francis Bacon

427. “Before I start painting I have a slightly ambiguous feeling: happiness is a special excitement because unhappiness is always possible a moment later.”

— Francis Bacon

428. “Fortune makes him fool, whom she makes her darling.”

— Francis Bacon

429. “For behavior, men learn it, as they take diseases, one of another.”

— Francis Bacon

430. “Great art is deeply ordered. Even if within the order there may be enormously instinctive and accidental things, nevertheless they come out of a desire for ordering and for returning fact onto the nervous system in a more violent way.”

— Francis Bacon

431. “The momentous thing in human life is the art of winning the soul to good or evil.”

— Francis Bacon

432. “Great riches have sold more men than they have bought.”

— Francis Bacon

433. “In things that are tender and unpleasing, it is good to break the ice by some one whose words are of less weight, and to reserve the more weighty voice to come in as by chance.”

— Francis Bacon

434. “It is the true office of history to represent the events themselves, together with the counsels, and to leave the observations and conclusions thereupon to the liberty and faculty of every man’s judgment.”

— Francis Bacon

435. “I don’t believe art is available; it’s rare and curious and should be completely isolated; one is more aware of its magic the more it is isolated.”

— Francis Bacon

436. “Whence we see spiders, flies, or ants entombed and preserved forever in amber, a more than royal tomb.”

— Francis Bacon

437. “A cat will never drown if she sees the shore.”

— Francis Bacon

438. “You could say that I have no inspiration, that I only need to paint.”

— Francis Bacon

439. “That things are changed, and that nothing really perishes, and that the sum of matter remains exactly the same, is sufficiently certain.”

— Francis Bacon

440. “I have to hope that my instincts will do the right thing, because I can’t erase what I have done. And if I drew something first, then my paintings would be illustrations of drawings.”

— Francis Bacon

441. “Pictures and shapes are but secondary objects and please or displease only in the memory.”

— Francis Bacon

442. “I want to make portraits and images. I don’t know how. Out of despair, I just use paint anyway. Suddenly the things you make coagulate and take on just the shape you intend. Totally accurate marks, which are outside representational marks.”

— Francis Bacon

443. “Praise from the common people is generally false, and rather follows the vain than the virtuous.”

— Francis Bacon

444. “The correlative to loving our neighbors as ourselves is hating ourselves as we hate our neighbors.”

— Francis Bacon

445. “Life, an age to the miserable, and a moment to the happy.”

— Francis Bacon

446. “So that every wand or staff of empire is forsooth curved at top.”

— Francis Bacon

447. “Suspicions that the mind, of itself, gathers, are but buzzes; but suspicions that are artificially nourished and put into men’s heads by the tales and whisperings of others, have stings.”

— Francis Bacon

448. “He that cometh to seek after knowledge, with a mind to scorn, shall be sure to find matter for his humour, but no matter for his instruction.”

— Francis Bacon

449. “Man was formed for society.”

— Francis Bacon

450. “Vices of the time; vices of the man.”

— Francis Bacon