Francis Bacon

Images also help me find and realise ideas. I look at hundreds of very different, contrasting images and I pinch details from them, rather like people who eat from other people

To choose time is to save time.

For a crowd is not company; and faces are but a gallery of pictures; and talk but a tinkling cymbal, where there is no love.

Young people are fitter to invent than to judge; fitter for execution than for counsel; and more fit for new projects than for settled business.

There is a wisdom in this beyond the rules of physic: a man’s own observation what he finds good of and what he finds hurt of is the best physic to preserve health.

There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion.

The world will never be long without some good reason to hate the unhappy; their real faults are immediately detected, and if those are not sufficient to sink them into infamy, an additional weight of calumny will be super added.

In general, the art of government consists of taking as much money as possible from one class of citizens to give to another.

Youth is like spring, an over-praised season more remarkable for biting winds than genial breezes. Autumn is the mellower season, and what we lose in flowers we more than gain in fruits.

The pencil of the Holy Ghost hath labored more in describing the afflictions of Job than the felicities of Solomon.

No matter how carefully you plan your goals they will never be more than pipe dreams unless you pursue them with gusto.

Talent for talent’s sake is a bauble and a show. Talent working with joy in the cause of universal truth lifts the possessor to new power as a benefactor.

He who distinguishes the true savor of his food can never be a glutton; he who does not cannot be otherwise.

The way you think, the way you behave, the way you eat, can influence your life by 30 to 50 years.

There can be no friendship without confidence, and no confidence without integrity.

In the multitude of middle-aged men who go about their vocations in a daily course determined for them much in the same way as the tie of their cravats, there is always a good number who once meant to shape their own deeds and alter the world a little.

There is a wisdom in this beyond the rules of physic: a man’s own observation what he finds good of and what he finds hurt of is the best physic to preserve health.

Shams and delusions are esteemed for soundest truths, while reality is fabulous. If men would steadily observe realities only, and not allow themselves to be deluded, life … would be like a fairy tale and the Arabian Nights’ Entertainments.

The gap that’s opened I’m filling with fairy dust, hues of the heart and a joy for life what was… I invite to exit right quietly, in shades of black and white.

We make a living by what we get. We make a life by what we give.

The virtues of society are vices of the saint. The terror of reform is the discovery that we must cast away our virtues, or what we have always esteemed such, into the same pit that has consumed our grosser vices.