Francis Bacon

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

Therefore if a man look sharply and attentively, he shall see Fortune; for though she be blind, yet she is not invisible.

This is the foundation of all. We are not to imagine or suppose, but to discover, what nature does or may be made to do.

Truth is a naked and open daylight.

As the births of living creatures, at first, are ill-shapen: so are all Innovations, which are the births of time.

If a man be gracious and courteous to strangers, it shows he is a citizen of the world, and that his heart is no island cut off from other lands, but a continent that joins to them.

The triumphs of peace have been in some proximity to war. Whilst the hand was still familiar with the sword-hilt, whilst the habits of the camp were still visible in the port and complexion of the gentleman, his intellectual power culminated; the compression and tension of these stern conditions is a training for the finest and softest arts, and can rarely be compensated in tranquil times, except by some analogous vigor drawn from occupations as hardy as war.

A man’s wife has more power over him than the state has.

A friend is a person with whom I may be sincere. Before him I may think aloud. I am arrived at last in the presence of a man so real and equal, that I may drop even those undermost garments of dissimulation, courtesy, and second thought, which men never put off, and may deal with him with the simplicity and wholeness with which one chemical atom meets another.

It is nobler to be good, and it is nobler to teach others to be good – and less trouble!

You should read history and look at ostracism, persecution, martyrdom, and that kind of thing. They always happen to the best men, you know.

The man who writes about himself and his own time is the only man who writes about all people and about all time.

Be humble. It becomes a creature, a depending and borrowed being, that lives not of itself, but breathes in another’s air with another’s breath, and is accountable for every moment of time and can call nothing its own, but is absolutely a tenant at will of the great Lord of heaven and earth.

There is a tendency for things to right themselves.

Every man’s work, whether it be literature, or music or pictures or architecture or anything else, is always a portrait of himself.

Life is largely a matter of expectation.

True godliness does not turn men out of the world, but enables them to live better in it and excites their endeavors to mend it.

Letting go is not giving up.

The pleasure we feel in music springs from the obedience which is in it.

The idea of perfection always gives one a chance to talk without knowing facts.

The virtue in most request is conformity.