Francis Bacon

Hope is a good breakfast, but it is a bad supper.

Truth emerges more readily from error than from confusion.

In every great time there is some one idea at work which is more powerful than any other, and which shapes the events of the time and determines their ultimate issues.

Natural abilities are like natural plants; they need pruning by study.

Houses are built to live in, and not to look on: therefore let use be preferred before uniformity.

Boldness is ever blind, for it sees not dangers and inconveniences whence it is bad in council though good in execution.

Train hard, turn up, run your best and the rest will take care of itself.

I am certainly not one of those who need to be prodded. In fact, if anything, I am the prod.

Life is not a spectator sport. If you’re going to spend your whole life in the grandstand just watching what goes on, in my opinion you’re wasting your life.

Poor fellow! I think he is in love with you.’ I am not aware of it. And to me it is one of the most odious things in a girl’s life, that there must always be some supposition of falling in love coming between her and any man who is kind to her… I have no ground for the nonsensical vanity of fancying everybody who comes near me is in love with me.

You can free yourself from aging by reinterpreting your body and by grasping the link between belief and biology.

Do not tell me of my obligation to put all poor men in good situations. Are they my poor? I tell thee, thou foolish philanthropist, that I grudge the dollar, the dime, the cent, I give to such men as do not belong to me and to whom I do not belong.

To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.

He is no wise man who will quit a certainty for an uncertainty.

Self-preservation is the first law of nature.

Best friends that pick wedgies together stay besties for life!

Censorship ends in logical completeness when nobody is allowed to read any books except the books that nobody reads.

Believe nothing against another but on good authority; and never report what may hurt another, unless it be a greater hurt to some other to conceal it.

We do not quite forgive a giver. The hand that feeds us is in some danger of being bitten.

Leave the rest to the gods.

Virtue is like a rich stone, best plain set.