Francis Bacon

To be free minded and cheerfully disposed at hours of meat and sleep and of exercise is one of the best precepts of long lasting.

The best part of beauty is that which no picture can express.

The desire of excessive power caused the angels to fall; the desire of knowledge caused men to fall.

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

A man must make his opportunity, as oft as find it.

It is impossible to love and to be wise.

Let freedom reign. The sun never set on so glorious a human achievement.

When a man is in doubt about this or that in his writing, it will often guide him if he asks himself how it will tell a hundred years hence.

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing there is a field. I’ll meet you there. When the soul lies down in that grass the world is too full to talk about.

A man finds room in the few square inches of the face for the traits of all his ancestors; for the expression of all his history, and his wants.

Words are but the signs of ideas.

I am admonished in many ways that time is pushing me inexorably along. I am approaching the threshold of age; in 1977 I shall be 142. This is no time to be flitting about the earth. I must cease from the activities proper to youth and begin to take on the dignities and gravities and inertia proper to that season of honorable senility which is on its way.

What could we accomplish if we knew we could not fail?

It’s easy to have faith in yourself and have discipline when you’re a winner, when you’re number one. What you got to have is faith and discipline when you’re not a winner.

Quarrel? Nonsense; we have not quarreled. If one is not to get into a rage sometimes, what is the good of being friends?

We are always getting ready to live but never living.

There is something in the human spirit that will survive and prevail, there is a tiny and brilliant light burning in the heart of man that will not go out no matter how dark the world becomes.

The best way to be boring is to leave nothing out.

There are men whose manners have the same essential splendor as the simple and awful sculpture on the friezes of the Parthenon, and the remains of the earliest Greek art.

My love for you was like a poem I wrote; one that I disregarded as average. Torn out, thrown away to the rubbish heap, waiting; wishing to be picked up and appreciated by someone else, for the masterpiece that it is.

The search after the great men is the dream of youth, and the most serious occupation of manhood.