Francis Bacon

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

Wise men make more opportunities than they find.

Nothing does more hurt in a state than that cunning men pass for wise.

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

I hold every man a debtor to his profession.

There be three things which make a nation great and prosperous: a fertile soil, busy workshops, easy conveyance for men and goods from place to place.

There is no sincerer love than the love of food.

The camera can represent flesh so superbly that, if I dared, I would never photograph a figure without asking that figure to take its clothes off.

The intellectual man requires a fine bait; the sots are easily amused. But everybody is drugged with his own frenzy, and the pageant marches at all hours, with music and banner and badge.

History doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme.

Some thoughts always find us young, and keep us so. Such a thought is the love of the universal and eternal beauty.

Heaven is under our feet as well as over our heads.

You don’t learn to hold your own in the world by standing on guard, but by attacking and getting well hammered yourself.

Every man is guilty of all the good he did not do.

Union may be strength, but it is mere blind brute strength unless wisely directed.

I heartily accept the motto,That government is best which governs least; and I should like to see it acted up to more rapidly and systematically. Carried out, it finally amounts to this, which I also believe,That government is best which governs not at all; and when men are prepared for it, that will be the kind of government which they will have. Government is at best but an expedient; but most governments are usually, and all governments are sometimes, inexpedient.

But real action is in silent moments. The epochs of our life are not in the visible facts of our choice of a calling, our marriage, our acquisition of an office, and the like, but in a silent thought by the wayside as we walk; in a thought which revises our entire manner of life, and says.

That which is false troubles the heart, but truth brings joyous tranquility.

A man is not finished when he is defeated. He is finished when he quits.

There is always a best way of doing everything.

It is said that the world is in a state of bankruptcy, that the world owes the world more than the world can pay.