Francis Bacon

People have discovered that they can fool the devil; but they can’t fool the neighbors.

Riches are a good hand maiden, but a poor mistress.

A sudden bold and unexpected question does many times surprise a man and lay him open.

Opportunity makes a thief.

Houses are built to live in, and not to look on: therefore let use be preferred before uniformity.

Read not to contradict and confute, not to believe and take for granted, not to find talk and discourse, but to weigh and consider. Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested: that is, some books are to be read only in parts, others to be read, but not curiously, and some few to be read wholly, and with diligence and attention.

The volatile truth of our words should continually betray the inadequacy of the residual statement.

Art is a jealous mistress; and if a man have a genius for painting, poetry, music, architecture or philosophy, he makes a bad husband and an ill provider.

For who is pleased with himself.

What is the matter with the poor is poverty; what is the matter with the rich is uselessness.

Do you know that the tendrils of graft and corruption have become mighty interlacing roots so that even men who would like to be honest are tripped and trapped by them?

Any emotion, if it is sincere, is involuntary.

Good poetry seems too simple and natural a thing that when we meet it we wonder that all men are not always poets. Poetry is nothing but healthy speech.

Character is just another word for having a perfectly disciplined and educated will.

The public do not know enough to be experts, but know enough to decide between them.

A man is what he thinks about all day long.

Only those who know the supremacy of the intellectual life can understand the grief of one who falls from that serene activity into the absorbing soul-wasting struggle with worldly annoyances.

When you’re first figuring yourself out, you care so much about what people think of you.

I desire no future that will break the ties with the past.

The greater part of what my neighbors call good I believe in my soul to be bad, and if I repent of anything, it is very likely to be my good behavior. What demon possessed me that I behaved so well? You may say the wisest thing you can, old man, you who have lived seventy years, not without honor of a kind, I hear an irresistible voice which invites me away from all that.

In sculpture did ever anybody call the Apollo a fancy piece? Or say of the Laocoon how it might be made different? A masterpiece of art has in the mind a fixed place in the chain of being, as much as a plant or a crystal.