Francis Bacon

Silence is the virtue of fools.

Men fear death as children fear to go in the dark; and as that natural fear in children is increased by tales, so is the other.

The person is a poor judge who by an action can be disgraced more in failing than they can be honored in succeeding.

Prosperity is not without many fears and distastes; adversity not without many comforts and hopes.

Speech of yourself ought to be seldom and well chosen.

Lies are sufficient to breed opinion, and opinion brings on substance.

Think of and look at your work as though it were done by your enemy. I you look at it to admire it, you are lost.

The colleges, while they provide us with libraries, furnish no professors of books; and I think no chair is so much needed.

Success must include two things: the development of an individual to his utmost potentiality and a contribution of some kind to one’s world.

Virtue knows that it is impossible to get on without compromise, and tunes herself, as it were, a trifle sharp to allow for an inevitable fall in playing.

Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them.

Leisure and curiosity might soon make great advances in useful knowledge, were they not diverted by minute emulation and laborious trifles.

Judges ought to be more learned than witty, more reverent than plausible, and more advised than confident. Above all things, integrity is their portion and proper virtue.

Some people wave their dogmatic thinking until their own reason is entangled.

It’s not given to people to judge what’s right or wrong. People have eternally been mistaken and will be mistaken, and in nothing more than in what they consider right and wrong.

There is a time when a man distinguishes the idea of felicity from the idea of wealth; it is the beginning of wisdom.

Nothing does Reason more Right, than the Coolness of those that offer it: for Truth often suffers more by the heat of its defenders than from the arguments of its opposers.

Aim above morality. Be not simply good, be good for something.

If there is something to gain and nothing to lose by asking, by all means ask!

The purpose of life is to live it, to taste experience to the utmost, to reach out eagerly and without fear for newer and richer experience.

Home life is no more natural to us than a cage is natural to a cockatoo.