Francis Bacon

The correlative to loving our neighbors as ourselves is hating ourselves as we hate our neighbors.

Fame is like a river, that beareth up things light and swollen, and drowns things weighty and solid.

Cure the disease and kill the patient.

They are ill discoverers that think there is no land, when they can see nothing but sea.

The person is a poor judge who by an action can be disgraced more in failing than they can be honored in succeeding.

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

The hottest love has the coldest end.

I think I have a good deal of my Uncle Theodore in me, because I could not, at any age, be content to take my place by the fireside and simply look on.

Beware of the man who does not return your blow: he neither forgives you nor allows you to forgive yourself.

Wonder is the beginning of wisdom.

A wise man does not waste so good a commodity as lying for naught.

Life’s most persistent and urgent question is, ‘What are you doing for others?’

Sir, he throws away his money without thought and without merit. I do not call a tree generous that sheds its fruit at every breeze.

Every one is a genius, more or less. No one is so physically sound that no part of him will be even a little unsound, and no one is so diseased but that some part of him will be healthy — so no man is so mentally and morally sound, but that he will be in part both mad and wicked; and no man is so mad and wicked but he will be sensible and honourable in part. In like manner there is no genius who is not also a fool, and no fool who is not also a genius.

Men over forty are no judges of a book written in a new spirit.

The two offices of memory are collection and distribution.

We are free to yield to truth.

Haste makes Work which Caution prevents.

The squirrel that you kill in jest, dies in earnest.

The stupidity of men always invites the insolence of power.

Do what you feel in your heart to be right – for you’ll be criticized anyway.