Sir Francis Bacon Quotes

Some books should be tasted, some devoured, but only a few should be chewed and digested thoroughly.

Begin doing what you want to do now. We are not living in eternity. We have only this moment, sparkling like a star in our hand--and melting like a snowflake...

The general root of superstition : namely, that men observe when things hit, and not when they miss; and commit to memory the one, and forget and pass over the other.

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.

Histories make men wise; poets, witty; the mathematics, subtle; natural philosophy, deep; moral, grave; logic and rhetoric, able to contend.

Nature is often hidden, sometimes overcome, seldom extinguished.

Knowledge is power.

We have only this moment, sparkling like a star in our hand and melting like a snowflake...

To suffering there is a limit; to fearing, none.

A Man must make his opportunity,as oft as find it

Choose the life that is most useful, and habit will make it the most agreeable.

There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion. —Sir Francis Bacon

Books speak plain when counselors blanch.

Seek ye first the good things of the mind, and the rest shall be provided or its loss shall not be felt.

Death is a friend of ours; and he that is not ready to entertain him is not at home.

REVENGE is a kind of wild justice; which the more man’s nature runs to, the more ought law to weed it out.

Aristippus said: That those that studied particular sciences, and neglected philosophy, were like Penelope's wooers, that made love to the waiting women.

For all knowledge and wonder (which is the seed of knowledge) is an impression of pleasure in itself.

If a man look sharply and attentively, he shall see fortune; for though she be blind, yet she is not invisible.

Money is a good servant but a bad master. —SIR FRANCIS BACON

Quien no quiere pensar es un fanático; quien no puede pensar es un idiota; quien no osa pensar es un cobarde.

The suspect nature of these stories can be seen in the anecdote Jefferson told of Hamilton visiting his lodging in 1792 and inquiring about three portraits on the wall. “They are my trinity of the three greatest men the world has ever produced,” Jefferson replied: “Sir Francis Bacon, Sir Isaac Newton, and John Locke.” Hamilton supposedly replied, “The greatest man that ever lived was Julius Casar.

Mixture of lie doeth ever add pleasure.

Whosoever is delighted in Solitude, is either a wild Beast or a God.

Atheism leads a man to sense, to philosophy, to natural piety, to laws, to reputation: all of which may be guides to an outward moral virtue.

Lie faces God and shrikns from men

To spend too much time in them [studying] is sloth, to use them too much for ornament is affectation, to make judgment wholly by their rules is the humor* of a scholar….

Atheism leads a man to sense, to philosophy, to natural piety, to laws, to reputation: all of which may be guides to an outward moral virtue. (c. 1625)

scientia potentia est

I would by all means have men beware, lest Aesop's pretty fable of the fly that sate on the pole of a chariot at the Olympic races and said, 'What a dust do I raise,' be verified in them. For so it is that some small observation, and that disturbed sometimes by the instrument, sometimes by the eye, sometimes by the calculation, and which may be owing to some real change in the sky, raises new skies and new spheres and circles.

His books stood neatly along the glassed-in shelves of four vaultlike oak bookcases: the collected Shakespeare, Jefferson’s essays, Thoreau, Paine, Rousseau, Crevecoeur, Locke, Emerson, Hawthorne, Melville, Twain, Dickens, Tolstoy. Henri Bergson, William James, Darwin, Buffon, Lyell, Charles Lamb, Sir Francis Bacon, Lord Chesterton. Swift, Pope, Defoe, Stevenson, Saint Augustine, Aristotle, Virgil, Plutarch. Plato, Sophocles, Homer, Dryden, Coleridge, Shelley, Shaw. A History of Washington State, A History of the Olympic Peninsula, A History of Island County, Gardens and Gardening, Scientific Agriculture, The Care and Cultivation of Fruit Trees and Ornamental

Atheism leaves a man to sense, to philosophy, to natural piety, to laws, to reputation; all of which may be guides to an outward moral virtue, even if religion vanished; but religious superstition dismounts all these and erects an absolute monarchy in the minds of men.

All rising to great place is by a winding stair. —Sir Francis Bacon,

Sir Francis Bacon wrote, “Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested:

The great secretary of nature and all learning, Sir Francis Bacon.

The worst solitude,” wrote Sir Francis Bacon, “is to be destitute of sincere friendship.

talking about clear minds writing in clear language—the predictions of Saint Augustine, Sir Francis Bacon, Newton, Einstein, the list goes on and on, all anticipating a transformative moment of enlightenment. Even

Voltaire once wrote, “Judge a man by his questions rather than his answers.” Sir Francis Bacon added, “A prudent question is one-half of wisdom.” Indira Gandhi concluded that “the power to question is the basis of all human progress.” Great questions are clearly the quickest path to great answers.

Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge. More simply known as the Royal Society, the world’s oldest national scientific organization was established in 1660 to promote and disseminate “new science” by big thinkers of the day such as Sir Francis Bacon, the Enlightenment’s promulgator of “the prolongation of life.

I had rather believe all the fables in the Legend, the Talmud, and the Alcoran, than that this universal frame is without a mind.

It is with great cunning that we assume the name of the world

Sir Francis Bacon, believed by some to be the real author of the Shakespeare material as well as the person who masterminded and oversaw production of the King James Version (KJV) of the Bible. Bacon was in charge of forty-five scholars who translated and collated the KJV, making him the forty-sixth. For a coded clue as to Bacon’s contributions, see Psalms 46—count forty-six letters from the beginning to get the word “shake” and forty-six words from the end to get the word “spear.” The number forty-six was Bacon’s cypher.

Nearly four centuries ago, the philosopher and scientist Sir Francis Bacon wrote about the ways in which the mind errs, and he considered the failure to consider absences among the most serious: By far the greatest impediment and aberration of the human understanding arises from [the fact that]…those things which strike the sense outweigh things which, although they may be more important, do not strike it directly. Hence, contemplation usually ceases with seeing, so much so that little or no attention is paid to things invisible.6

(3) The acceptance of psychological myths can impede our critical thinking in other areas. As astronomer Carl Sagan (1995) noted, our failure to distinguish myth from reality in one domain of scientific knowledge, such as psychology, can easily spill over to a failure to distinguish fact from fiction in other vitally important areas of modern society. These domains include genetic engineering, stem cell research, global warming, pollution, crime prevention, schooling, day care, and overpopulation, to name merely a few. As a consequence, we may find ourselves at the mercy of policy-makers who make unwise and even dangerous decisions about science and technology. As Sir Francis Bacon reminded us, knowledge is power. Ignorance is powerlessness.

The pleasures of the fancy are more conducive to health, than those of the understanding, which are worked out by dint of thinking, and attended with too violent a labour of the brain. Delightful scenes, whether in nature, painting, or poetry, have a kindly influence on the body, as well as the mind, and not only serve to clear and brighten the imagination, but are able to disperse grief and melancholy, and to set the animal spirits in pleasing and agreeable motions. For this reason Sir Francis Bacon, in his Essay upon Health, has not thought it improper to prescribe to his reader a poem or a prospect, where he particularly dissuades him from knotty and subtle disquisitions, and advises him to pursue studies that fill the mind with splendid and illustrious objects, as histories, fables, and contemplations of nature.

The Idols of the Tribe have their foundation in human nature itself, and in the tribe or race of men. For it is a false assertion that the sense of man is the measure of things. On the contrary, all perceptions as well of the sense as of the mind are according to the measure of the individual and not according to the measure of the universe. And the human understanding is like a false mirror, which, receiving rays irregularly, distorts and discolors the nature of things by mingling its own nature with it.

Sir Francis Bacon said, “Knowledge is power.

Sir Francis Bacon once said, ‘A wise man will make more opportunities than he finds.

Sir Francis Bacon afirmó que «las cosas cambian para peor espontáneamente si no son cambiadas para mejor a propósito».

Buchanan tried to whip the devil out of me. “Find your tongue, lad!” Forgive this regression, but the man hated English. He may have hated everything by then, including me, but he was uncommon prickly when it came to English. You could tell by the way he bullied it. “The bastarde English,” the old man roared. “The verie whoore of a tongue.” We did our best to mimic him note for note, gesture for gesture. He hated that, too. The verie whoore. Old Greek before Breakfast Latin by Noon himself. The point is, what English I had was beaten or twisted into me. We were orphaned and crowned before we could speak or take our first step. No father. No mother. Too many uncles. Hounds for baying. Buchanan was the most religious of my keepers, and the unkindest of spirits among them. We have been told the young queen of Scots was once his student, and that he loved her. Just before giving her over to wreckage, methinks. Pious frauds. Their wicked Jesus. Then occasion smil’d. We were thirteen. The affection of Esme Stuart was one thing, lavished, as it was, so liberally upon us, but the music of his voice was another. We empowered our cousin, gave him name, station, a new sense of gravity, height, and reach, all the toys of privilege. We were told he spoke our mother’s French, the way it flutters about your neck like a small bird. But it was his English that moved us. For the first time, there was kindness in it, charity, heat and light. We didn’t know language could do such things, that could charm with such violence, make such a disturbance in us. Our cousin was our excess, our vice, our great transgression according to some, treason according to others. They came one night and stole him from us, that is, from me. They tore me out of his arms, called me wanton. Better that bairns should weepe, they said. Barking curs. We never saw our cousin again and were never the same after. But the charm was wound up. If we say we can taste words, we are not trying to be clever. And we are an insatiable king. Try now, if you can, to understand the nature of our thoughts touching the translation, its want of a poet. We will consult with Sir Francis. He is closer to the man, some say, than a brother. English is mistress between them. There, Bacon says, is empire. There, a great Britain. Where it is dull, where the glow . . . gleam . . . where the gleam of Majestie is absent or mute . . . When occasion smiles again, we will send for the man, Shakespere. Majestie has left its print on his art. After that hideous Scottish play, his best, darkest, and most complicated characters are . . . us. Lear. Antony. Othello. Fools all. All. The English language must be the best that is in us . . . We are but names, titles, antiquities, forgotten speeches, an accident of blood and historical memory. Aye . . . but this marvelously unexceptional little man. No more of this. By the unfortunate title of this history we must, it seems, prepare ourselves for a tragedy. Some will escape. Some will not. For bully Ben can never suffer a true rival. He killed an actor once for botching his lines. Actors. Southampton waits in our chambers. We will let him. First, to our thoughts. Only then to our Lord of Southampton.

Voltaire once wrote, “Judge a man by his questions rather than his answers.” Sir Francis Bacon added, “A prudent question is one-half of wisdom.” Indira Gandhi concluded that “the power to question is the basis of all human progress.” Great questions are clearly the quickest path to great answers. Every discoverer and inventor begins his quest with a transformative question.

Power to do good is the true and lawful end of aspiring. —Sir Francis Bacon

In her groundbreaking 1980 book The Death of Nature, the environmental historian Carolyn Merchant reminded readers that up until the 1600s, the earth was seen as alive, usually taking the form of a mother [...] The metaphor changed with the unlocking of some (but by no means all) of nature's mysteries during the scientific revolution of the 1600s. With nature now cast as a machine, devoid of mystery or divinity, its component parts could be dammed, extracted, and remade with impunity. Nature still sometimes appeared as a woman, but one easily dominated and subdued. Sir Francis Bacon best encapsulated the new ethos when he wrote in the 1623 De dignitate et augmentis scientiarium that nature is to be "put in contraint, moulded, and made as it were new by art and the hand of man." Those words may as well have been BP's corporate mission statement.

Sir Francis Bacon, supplied one answer: It leaves us firmly in charge. As self-declared pundit of the new science, Bacon was delighted to see Aristotelian natural philosophy with its “contentiousness” (an odd complaint from a lawyer) and its fetish for words, not deeds (ditto), get swept away.2 Now men could get down to the business of forcing Nature to reveal her secrets for our use, Bacon said. He liked to speak of putting Nature “on the rack” through constant experiment and verification, like a helpless prisoner being questioned in front of a judge and jury. “Nature exhibits herself more clearly,” Bacon wrote, “through the trials and vexation of art than when left to herself.

Quien se conforme con ganancias seguras, difícilmente llegará a amasar grandes riquezas; quien lo fíe todo a grandes aventuras, frecuentemente quebrará y caerá en la pobreza: es bueno, por lo tanto, proteger las aventuras con los frutos de la certidumbre para que puedan soportar las pérdidas. Sir Francis Bacon

In his treatise on Atheism, Sir Francis Bacon tersely summarizes the situation thus: "A little philosophy inclineth man's mind to atheism; but depth in philosophy bringeth men's mind about to religion.

A sudden bold and unexpected question doth many times surprise a man and lay him open. —Sir Francis Bacon, 1561-1626

Sir Francis Bacon wrote, “Reading maketh a full man … writing an exact man.

In 1577 there was committed to prison at Oxford a certain Rowland Jencks, a Catholic bookbinder who was accused of speaking evil of ‘that government now settled,’ of profaning God’s Word, abusing the ministers, and staying away from church. Considering the times, he appears to have been a fellow of spirit and conviction. Just before his trial started a number of inmates of the prison at Oxford died in their chains. The trial, at which Jencks was condemned to have his ears cut off, took place in a court usually crowded because of the lively public interest aroused by the Jencks case. Soon after the trial typhus began to appear among those who had been present. MacArthur tells us that Sir Robert Bell, the Lord Chief Baron, and Sir Nicholas Barham both died, as did the sheriff, the undersheriff, and all of the members of the Grand Jury except one or two. The total deaths were over five hundred, of which one hundred were members of the University. The occurrence created considerable excitement, and even Sir Francis Bacon took the trouble to investigate, attributing the disease to the stinks that 'have some similitude with man’s body and so insinuate themselves.’ The theories of the day attributed most of these mysterious infections to vitiated air, a not unnatural assumption under the circumstances. In this particular case papistical evil magic was suspected in the form of winds compounded in Catholic Louvain and secretly let loose at Oxford, diabolicis et papisticis flatibus. Jencks himself, MacArthur says, though deprived of his ears, escaped the infection, settled in Douai, where he obtained employment as a baker in the English College of Seculars, and lived thirty-three years after the disastrous Assizes.

Ever since Sir Francis Bacon, in the early seventeenth century, scientists and philosophers of science have cautioned against the tendency to reject evidence that conflicts with our preconceptions, and to make assumptions about what assuredly would be true if only the appropriate measurements or experiments could be performed.

Sir Francis Bacon was one of the most all-round clever people who has ever lived. He did more different things than most of us can dream of. He was an English statesman, philosopher and Irish painter, who lived at the time of Elizabeth I and Elizabeth II. He not only became Lord Chancellor in 1618, but still found time to write one of the first science books in 1620, and, after a short rest, painted the painting Three Studies For Figures At The Base Of The Crucifixion in 1944. Some people believe he had a hand in writing Shakespeare’s plays, and his portrait of Lucien Freud, painted in 1969, when he was 408 years old and drunk, is one of the most expensive ever sold. He did so many things that he is one of the few historical English/Irish figures to require two completely different and contradictory Wikipedia pages.

some people since the mid-nineteenth century have argued that William Shakespeare could not have written the plays that bear his name. These persons have put forward some dozen names as more likely authors, among them Queen Elizabeth, Sir Francis Bacon, Edward de Vere (earl of Oxford), and Christopher Marlowe. Such attempts to find what for these people is a more believable author of the plays is a tribute to the regard in which the plays are held. Unfortunately for their claims, the documents that exist that provide evidence for the facts of Shakespeare’s life tie him inextricably to the body of plays and poems that bear his name. Unlikely as it seems to those who want the works to have been written by an aristocrat, a university graduate, or an “important” person, the plays and poems seem clearly to have been produced by a man from Stratford-upon-Avon with a very good “grammar-school” education and a life of experience in London and in the world of the London theater. (Folger Shakespeare)

Voltaire once wrote, “Judge a man by his questions rather than his answers.” Sir Francis Bacon added, “A prudent question is one-half of wisdom.” Indira Gandhi concluded that “the power to question is the basis of all human progress.