Francis Bacon

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

God hangs the greatest weights upon the smallest wires.

Men fear death as children fear to go in the dark; and as that natural fear in children is increased by tales, so is the other.

All of our actions take their hue from the complexion of the heart, as landscapes their variety from light.

Judges ought to be more learned than witty, more reverent than plausible, and more advised than confident. Above all things, integrity is their portion and proper virtue.

Of all virtues and dignities of the mind, goodness is the greatest, being the character of the Deity; and without it, man is a busy, mischievous, wretched thing.

It is one of the superstitions of the human mind to have imagined that virginity could be a virtue.

If a man’s eye is on the Eternal, his intellect will grow.

The problems of victory are more agreeable than those of defeat, but they are no less difficult.

Our strength grows out of our weakness.

Sincerity is the highest complement you can pay.

We fly to beauty as an asylum from the terrors of finite nature.

The cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.

The ocean is a wilderness reaching round the globe, wilder than a Bengal jungle, and fuller of monsters, washing the very wharves of our cities and the gardens of our sea-side residences.

Censure is willingly indulged, because it always implies some superiority: men please themselves with imagining that they have made a deeper search, or wider survey than others, and detected faults and follies which escape vulgar observation.

The best augury of a man’s success in his profession is that he thinks it the finest in the world.

For the most important decisions in your life, trust your intuition, and then work with everything you have, to prove it right.

We are much beholden to Machiavel and others, that write what men do, and not what they ought to do.

As a single footstep will not make a path on the earth, so a single thought will not make a pathway in the mind. To make a deep physical path, we walk again and again. To make a deep mental path, we must think over and over the kind of thoughts we wish to dominate our lives.

How real is any of the past, being every moment revalued to make the present possible.

This body of mine is my teacher. This heart of mine, my guide. My dear head struggles to make sense of it all whilst my hands gently remind me to trust and let go.