Francis Bacon

Things alter for the worse spontaneously, if they be not altered for the better designedly.

Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed.

Cure the disease and kill the patient.

Men of age object too much, consult too long, adventure too little, repent too soon, and seldom drive business home to the full period, but content themselves with a mediocrity of success.

A prudent question is one-half of wisdom.

The best part of beauty is that which no picture can express.

You use a glass mirror to see your face; you use works of art to see your soul.

If we attend continually and promptly to the little that we can do, we shall ere long be surprised to find how little remains that we cannot do.

We are not victims of aging, sickness and death. These are part of scenery, not the seer, who is immune to any form of change. This seer is the spirit, the expression of eternal being.

A pessimist is a man who thinks everybody is as nasty as himself.

Seek ye first the good things of the mind, and the rest will either be supplied or its loss will not be felt.

The way it is now, the asylums can hold the sane people but if we tried to shut up the insane we would run out of building materials.

A Native American elder once described his own inner struggles in this manner: Inside of me there are two dogs. One of the dogs is mean and evil. The other dog is good. The mean dog fights the good dog all the time. When asked which dog wins, he reflected for a moment and replied, The one I feed the most. On Other Peoples Expectations: The only man who behaved sensibly was my tailor; he took my measurement anew every time he saw me, while all the rest went on with their old measurements and expected them to fit me.

Believing that I was born for the service of mankind, and regarding the care of the commonwealth as a kind of common property which, like the air and the water, belongs to everybody, I set myself to consider in what way mankind might be best served, and what service I was myself best fitted by nature to perform.

There are some sluggish men who are improved by drinking; as there are fruits that are not good until they are rotten.

A toddling little girl is a center of common feeling which makes the most dissimilar people understand each other.

Martyrdom covers a multitude of sins.

Our dead are never dead to us, until we have forgotten them.

All diseases run into one, old age.

Have the fearless attitude of a hero and the loving heart of a child.

Life is too precious to be spent in this weaving and unweaving of false impressions, and it is better to live quietly under some degree of misrepresentation than to attempt to remove it by the uncertain process of letter-writing.