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.

It is natural to die as to be born.

The root of all superstition is that men observe when a thing hits, but not when it misses.

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

Atheism is rather in the lip than in the heart of man.

For knowledge itself is power.

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.

The knowledge of an unlearned man is living and luxuriant like a forest, but covered with mosses and lichens and for the most part inaccessible and going to waste; the knowledge of the man of science is like timber collected in yards for public works, which still supports a green sprout here and there, but even this is liable to dry rot.

I want to be all used up when I die.

To watch this crystal globe just sent from heaven to associate with me. While these clouds and this somber drizzling weather shut all in, we two draw nearer and know one another. The gathering in of the clouds with the last rush and dying breath of the wind, and then the regular dripping of twigs and leaves the country over, the impression of inward comfort and Sociableness, the drenched stubble and trees that drop beads on you as you pass, their dim outline seen through the rain on all sides drooping in sympathy with yourself. These are my undisputed territory. This is Nature’s English comfort.

You find no man, at all intellectual, who is willing to leave London. No, Sir, when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford.

I desire no future that will break the ties with the past.

When a stupid man is doing something he is ashamed of, he always declares that it is his duty.

What do we call love, hate, charity, revenge, humanity, forgiveness? Different results of the master impulse, the necessity of securing one’s self-approval.

Write it on your heart that every day is the best day in the year.

Put on the lights there, now. Before we go any further here, has it ever occurred to any of you that all this is simply one grand misunderstanding? Since you’re not here to learn anything, but to be taught so you can pass these tests, knowledge has to be organized so it can be taught, and it has to be reduced to information so it can be organized do you follow that? In other words this leads you to assume that organization is an inherent property of knowledge itself, and that disorder and chaos are simply irrelevant forces that threaten it from outside. In fact it’s exactly the opposite. Order is simply a thin, perilous condition we try to impose on the basic reality of chaos…

We have not all had the good fortune to be ladies. We have not all been generals, or poets, or statesmen; but when the toast works down to the babies, we stand on common ground.

If people misunderstand you, do not worry…it is your voice that they hear, but what goes through their mind is…their own thoughts.

A friend may well be reckoned the masterpiece of nature.

In this war, a danger there is, of losing who we are.

The greatest lesson in life is to know that even fools are right sometimes.