"For my name and memory I leave to men's charitable speeches, and to foreign nations and the next ages."
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Quote collection
Francis Bacon quotes (page 16 of 33)
654 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"God hangs the greatest weights upon the smallest wires."
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"For there is a great difference in delivery of the mathematics , which are the most abstracted of knowledges, and policy , which is the most immersed. And howsoever contention hath been moved , touching a uniformity of method in multiformity of matter, yet we see how that opinion, besides the weakness of it, hath been of ill desert towards learning, as that which taketh the way to reduce learning to certain empty and barren generalities; being but the very husks and shells of sciences, all the kernel being forced out and expulsed with the torture and press of the method."
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"Crafty men condemn studies; Simple men admire them; And wise men use them: For they teach not their own use: but that is a wisdom without them, and above them, won by observation."
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"When a bee stings, she dies. She cannot sting and live. When men sting, their better selves die. Every sting kills a better instinct. Men must not turn bees and kill themselves in stinging others."
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"The universe must not be narrowed down to the limit of our understanding, but our understanding must be stretched and enlarged to take in the image of the universe as it is discovered."
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"Even within the most beautiful landscape, in the trees, under the leaves the insects are eating each other; violence is a part of life."
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"Money is a good servant, a dangerous master."
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"The genius, wit, and the spirit of a nation are discovered by their proverbs."
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"A cat will never drown if she sees the shore."
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"There is no greater wisdom than well to time the beginnings and onsets of things."
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"The worst solitude is to have no real friendships."
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"Such is the way of all superstition, whether in astrology, dreams, omens, divine judgments, or the like; wherein men, having a delight in such vanities, mark the events where they are fulfilled, but where they fail, though this happen much oftener."
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"Spouses are great impediments to great enterprises."
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"Men in great place are thrice servants: servants of the sovereign or state, servants of fame, and servants of business."
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"Man, being the servant and interpreter of Nature, can do and understand so much and so much only as he has observed in fact or thought of the course of nature; beyond this he neither knows anything nor can do anything."
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"I confess that I have as vast contemplative ends, as I have moderate civil ends: for I have taken all knowledge to be my province."
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"If I go to the National Gallery and I look at one of the great paintings that excite me there, it's not so much the painting that excites me as that the painting unlocks all kinds of valves of sensation within me which return me to life more violently."
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"Truth is a naked and open daylight, that does not show the masques, and mummeries, and triumphs of the world, half so stately and daintily as candle-lights. . . A mixture of a lie doth ever add pleasure"
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"Fortitude is the marshal of thought, the armor of the will, and the fort of reason."
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