Francis Bacon

For a crowd is not company; and faces are but a gallery of pictures; and talk but a tinkling cymbal, where there is no love.

Children sweeten labours, but they make misfortunes more bitter.

Pictures and shapes are but secondary objects and please or displease only in the memory.

As the births of living creatures, at first, are ill-shapen: so are all Innovations, which are the births of time.

Wise men make more opportunities than they find.

Silence is the virtue of fools.

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”.

Solitary trees, if they grow at all, grow strong.

The only reward of virtue is virtue the only way to have a friend is to be one.

Sweet and glorious it is to die for our country.

All censorships exist to prevent anyone from challenging current conceptions and existing institutions. All progress is initiated by challenging current conceptions, and executed by supplanting existing institutions. Consequently, the first condition of progress is the removal of censorship.

Events tend to recur in cycles.

As the Sandwich Islander believes that the strength and valor of the enemy he kills passes into himself, so we gain the strength of the temptation we resist.

The quieter you become, you more you are able to hear.

Any 20 year-old who isn’t a liberal doesn’t have a heart, and any 40 year-old who isn’t a conservative doesn’t have a brain.

When our relatives are at home, we have to think of all their good points or it would be impossible to endure them. But when they are away, we console ourselves for their absence by dwelling on their vices.

All the great ages have been ages of belief.

For too long I have silenced my heart, that now, when I give it the opportunity to speak, it no longer remembers its voice. Locked away, it forgot what it’s like to be free; to roam. Imprisoned within loneliness, I fear Stockholm syndrome has developed.

I have never developed indigestion from eating my words.

It appears to be a law that you cannot have a deep sympathy with both man and nature.

Perfection is not attainable, but if we chase perfection we can catch excellence.