Francis Bacon

Friendship increases in visiting friends, but in visiting them seldom.

God’s first creature, which was light.

Discern of the coming on of years, and think not to do the same things still; for age will not be defied.

If a man be gracious and courteous to strangers, it shows he is a citizen of the world, and that his heart is no island cut off from other lands, but a continent that joins to them.

A healthy body is a guest chamber for the soul: a sick body is a prison.

Certainly the best works, and of greatest merit for the public, have proceeded from the unmarried, or childless men.

Society is a masked ball, where every one hides his real character, and reveals it by hiding.

The ancestor of every action is a thought.

Subdue your passion or it will subdue you.

Make your own Bible. Select and collect all the words and sentences that in all your readings have been to you like the blast of a trumpet.

I have lived with several Zen masters – all of them cats.

Whatever the human law may be, neither an individual nor a nation can commit the least act of injustice against the obscurest individual without having to pay the penalty for it.

Experience is in the fingers and head. The heart is inexperienced.

Tragedy was foresworn, in ritual denial of the ripe knowledge that we are drawing away from one another, that we share only one thing, share the fear of belonging to another, or to others, or to God; love or money, tender equated in advertising and the world, where only money is currency, and under dead trees and brittle ornaments prehensile hands exchange forgeries of what the heart dare not surrender.

Be fearful when others are greedy and greedy when others are fearful.

According to this law [the law of Dharma], you have a unique talent and a unique way of expressing it. There is something that you can do better than anyone else in the whole world–and for every unique talent and unique expression of that talent, there are also unique needs. When these needs are matched with the creative expression of your talent, that is the spark that creates affluence. Expressing your talents to fulfill needs creates unlimited wealth and abundance.

There is no thought in any mind, but it quickly tends to convert itself into power.

So much of our time is spent in preparation, so much in routine, and so much in retrospect, that the amount of each person’s genius is confined to a very few hours.

There is a sort of subjection which is the peculiar heritage of largeness and of love; and strength is often only another name for willing bondage to irremediable weakness.

By indignities men come to dignities.

All styles are good except the tiresome kind.