Francis Bacon

The way of fortune is like the milkyway in the sky; which is a number of small stars, not seen asunder, but giving light together: so it is a number of little and scarce discerned virtues, or rather faculties and customs, that make men fortunate.

Read not to contradict and confute, nor to believe and take for granted… but to weigh and consider.

Ipsa Scientia Potestas Est (Knowledge Itself Is Power)

In taking revenge, a man is but even with his enemy; but in passing it over, he is superior.

The poets did well to conjoin music and medicine, because the office of medicine is but to tune the curious harp of man’s body.

All colors will agree in the dark.

Mr. Emerson visited Thoreau at the jail, and the meeting between the two philosophers must have been interesting and somewhat dramatic. The account of the meeting was told me by Miss Maria Thoreau Henry Thoreaus auntHenry, why are you here? Waldo, why are you not here?

There is no life I know to compare with pure imagination. Living there, you’ll be free if you truly wish to be.

Friends are true Twins in Soul; they Sympathize in every thing, and have the Love and Aversion. One is not happy without the other, nor can either of them be miserable alone. As if they could change Bodies, they take their turns in Pain as well as in Pleasure; relieving one another in their most adverse Conditions.What one enjoys, the other cannot Want. Like the Primitive Christians, they have all things in common, and no Property but in one another.

There comes a time in every rightly constructed boy’s life when he has a raging desire to go somewhere and dig for hidden treasure.

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

Surviving is important. Thriving is elegant.

I was exceedingly delighted with the waltz, and also with the polka. These differ in name, but there the difference ceases

When a man wants to murder a tiger he calls it sport; when a tiger wants to murder him he calls it ferocity.

It is better to be frightened now than killed hereafter

It is a wise tune that knows its own father, and I like my music to be the legitimate offspring of respectable parents.

The longer we live the more we think and the higher the value we put on friendship and tenderness towards parents and friends.

It is the flash which appears, the thunderbolt will follow.

Men achieve a certain greatness unawares, when working to another aim.

The job of the artist is always to deepen the mystery.

But human experience is usually paradoxical, that means incongruous with the phrases of current talk or even current philosophy.