Francis Bacon

Hope is a good breakfast, but it is a bad supper.

A man must make his opportunity, as oft as find it.

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

Read not to contradict and confute; nor to believe and take for granted; nor to find talk and discourse; but to weigh and consider.

Our humanity is a poor thing, except for the divinity that stirs within us.

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.

Nobody’s free until everybody’s free.

The most dangerous thing is illusion.

If you and I are having a single thought of violence or hatred against anyone in the world at this moment, we are contributing to the wounding of the world.

Our houses are such unwieldy property that we are often imprisoned rather than housed by them.

They change their climate, not their soul, who rush across the sea.

We must find our duties in what comes to us, not in what might have been.

To see helpless infancy stretching out her hands, and pouring out her cries in testimony of dependence, without any powers to alarm jealousy, or any guilt to alienate affection, must surely awaken tenderness in every human mind; and tenderness once excited will be hourly increased by the natural contagion of felicity, by the repercussion of communicated pleasure, by the consciousness of dignity of benefaction.

He is now rising from affluence to poverty.

Heroism works in contradiction to the voice of mankind and in contradiction, for a time, to the voice of the great and good. Heroism is an obedience to a secret impulse of an individual.

Any emotion, if it is sincere, is involuntary.

Everyone has been made for some particular work, and the desire for that work has been put in every heart.

I believe we are still so innocent. The species are still so innocent that a person who is apt to be murdered believes that the murderer, just before he puts the final wrench on his throat, will have enough compassion to give him one sweet cup of water.

We mustn’t be stiff and stand-off, you know. We must be thoroughly democratic, and patronize everybody without distinction of class.

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

Nothing is so exhilarating in life as to be shot at with no result.