Francis Bacon

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

Acorns were good until bread was found.

Revenge is a kind of wild justice, which the more a man’s nature runs to, the more ought law to weed it out.

Read not to contradict and confute; nor to believe and take for granted; nor to find talk and discourse; but to weigh and consider.

The serpent if it wants to become the dragon must eat itself.

Judges must beware of hard constructions and strained inferences, for there is no worse torture than that of laws.

What you do makes a difference. And you have to decide what kind of difference you want to make.

I am a child of the House of Commons. I was brought up in my fathers house to believe in democracy. Trust the peoplethat was his message.

You will find as you look back upon your life that the moments when you have truly lived are the moments when you have done things in the spirit of love.

There is no more fatal blunderer than he who consumes the greater part of his life getting his living.

There are a terrible lot of lies going about the world, and the worst of it is that half of them are true.

Wine gives a man nothing. It neither gives him knowledge nor wit; it only animates a man, and enables him to bring out what a dread of the company has repressed. It only puts in motion what had been locked up in frost.

Perhaps man is the only being that can properly be called idle.

Any 20 year-old who isn’t a liberal doesn’t have a heart, and any 40 year-old who isn’t a conservative doesn’t have a brain.

The soul is pure when it leaves the body and drags nothing bodily with it, by virtue of having no willing association with the body in life but avoiding it… Practicing philosophy in the right way is a training to die easily.

Valor consists in the power of self recovery.

In order to fully realize how bad a popular play can be, it is necessary to see it twice.

It is one of the blessings of old friends that you can afford to be stupid with them.

To be good is noble, but to teach others how to be good is nobler and less trouble.

The rich man is always sold to the institution which makes him rich. Absolutely speaking, the more money, the less virtue.

Nothing is beneath you if it is in the direction of your life.