Francis Bacon

The remedy is worse than the disease.

Life, an age to the miserable, and a moment to the happy.

Choose the life that is most useful, and habit will make it the most agreeable.

Men on their side must force themselves for a while to lay their notions by and begin to familiarize themselves with facts.

If a man’s wit be wandering, let him study the mathematics.

It is the true office of history to represent the events themselves, together with the counsels, and to leave the observations and conclusions thereupon to the liberty and faculty of every man’s judgment.

The listlessness of it all, the profit off depression, the extinction of an entire species, the chlorinated connections- poisoned just to appear clean.

He was doing missionary work. But from the outset he had little success in convincing his charges of their responsibility for a sin committed at the beginning of creation, one which, as they understood it, they were ready and capable (indeed, they carried charms to assure it) of duplicating themselves. He did no better convincing them that a man had died on a tree to save them all: an act which one old Indian, if Gwyon had translated correctly, regarded as “rank presumption”.

A man’s action is only a picture book of his creed.

There are various orders of beauty, causing men to make fools of themselves in various styles… but there is one order of beauty which seems made to turn the heads not only of men, but of all intelligent mammals, even of women. It is a beauty like that of kittens, or very small downy ducks making gentle rippling noises with their soft bills, or babies just beginning to toddle and to engage in conscious mischief -a beauty with which you can never be angry, but that you feel ready to crush for inability to comprehend the state of mind into which it throws you.

I believe that every person is born with talent.

A man may be so much of everything that he is nothing of anything.

Don’t try to solve serious matters in the middle of the night.

The man who does not read has no advantage over the man who cannot read.

More knowledge may be gained of a man’s real character by a short conversation with one of his servants than from a formal and studied narrative, begun with his pedigree and ended with his funeral.

The need for change bulldozed road down the center of my mind.

Our moments of inspiration are not lost though we have no particular poem to show for them; for those experiences have left an indelible impression, and we are ever and anon reminded of them.

Pain never really goes away; you just elevate and get used to it by growing stronger.

Habit is habit, and not to be flung out of the window by any man, but coaxed downstairs a step at a time.

I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it.

At the end of my life, with just one breath left, if you come, I’ll sit up and sing.