Francis Bacon

What is truth? said jesting Pilate; and would not stay for an answer.

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

Studies perfect nature and are perfected still by experience.

Philosophers make imaginary laws for imaginary commonwealths, and their discourses are as the stars, which give little light because they are so high.

Truth emerges more readily from error than from confusion.

Many a man’s strength is in opposition, and when he faileth, he grows out of use.

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.

Once made equal to man, woman becomes his superior.

There is nothing makes a man suspect much, more than to know little, and therefore men should remedy suspicion by procuring to know more, and not keep their suspicions in smother.

Opinions have vested interests just as men have.

The government who robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul.

By necessity, by proclivity, and by delight, we all quote. In fact it is as difficult to appropriate the thoughts of others as it is to invent.

But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.

What Englishman will give his mind to politics as long as he can afford to keep a motor car?

There are many victories worse than a defeat.

Usually the modest person passes for someone reserved, the silent for a sullen person

All of humanity is living in a dream world, but suffering real consequences.

You must get your living by loving, or at least half your life is a failure.

What we call education and culture is for the most part nothing but the substitution of reading for experience, of literature for life, of the obsolete fictitious for the contemporary real.

We are armed with language adequate to describe each leaf of the filed, but not to describe human character.

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.