Francis Bacon

Nothing destroys authority more than the unequal and untimely interchange of power stretched too far and relaxed too much.

By indignities men come to dignities.

None of the affections have been noted to fascinate and bewitch but envy.

It is not what we eat but what we digest that makes us strong; not what we gain but what we save that makes us rich; not what we read but what we remember that makes us learned; and not what we profess but what we practice that gives us integrity.

God’s first creature, which was light.

No man’s fortune can be an end worthy of his being.

Revenge is a kind of wild justice, which the more a man’s nature runs to, the more ought law to weed it out.

All endeavor calls for the ability to tramp the last mile, shape the last plan, endure the last hours toil. The fight to the finish spirit is the one… characteristic we must posses if we are to face the future as finishers.

Manners are the happy ways of doing things; each one a stroke of genius or of love, now repeated and hardened into usage, they form at last a rich varnish, with which the routine of life is washed, and its details adorned. If they are superficial, so are the dew-drops which give such a depth to the morning meadows.

Many people will walk in and out of your life, but only true friends will leave footprints in your heart.

Other men are lenses through which we read our own minds. Each man seeks those of different quality from his own, and such as are good of their kind; that is, he seeks other men, and the rest.

Sir, a man may be so much of everything, that he is nothing of anything.

Self-trust is the essence of heroism.

Contentment is natural wealth, luxury is artificial poverty.

In a good bookroom you feel in some mysterious way that you are absorbing the wisdom contained in all the books through your skin, without even opening them.

We must never cease to proclaim in fearless tones the great principles of freedom and the rights of man which are the joint inheritance of the English-speaking world and which through Magna Carta, the Bill of Rights, the Habeas Corpus, trial by jury, and the English common law find their most famous expression in the American Declaration of Independence.

Courage is exhilarating.

Ipsa Scientia Potestas Est (Knowledge Itself Is Power)

We are shut up in schools and college recitation rooms for ten or fifteen years, and come out at last with a belly-full of words and do not know a thing. The things taught in schools and colleges are not an education, but the means of education.

Blessed is the man, who having nothing to say, abstains from giving wordy evidence of the fact.

None are so old as those who have outlived enthusiasm.