Francis Bacon

I hold every man a debtor to his profession.

Certainly virtue is like precious odors, most fragrant when they are incensed, or crushed: for prosperity does best discover vice, but adversity does best discover virtue.

God hangs the greatest weights upon the smallest wires.

The poets did well to conjoin music and medicine, because the office of medicine is but to tune the curious harp of man’s body.

Nuptial love makes mankind; friendly love perfects it; but wanton love corrupts and debases it.

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 eyes indicate the antiquity of the soul.

This is the comfort of the godly: the grave cannot hold them, and they live as soon as they die. For death is no more than turning us over from time to eternity.

Amuse not thy self therefore with the numerous Opinions of the World, nor value thy self upon verbal Orthodoxy, Philosophy, or thy Skill in Tongues, or Knowledge of the Fathers; (too much the Business and Vanity of the World). But in this rejoyce, That thou knowest God, that is the Lord, who exerciseth loving Kindness, and Judgment; and Righteousness in the Earth.

I went to the Bach Choir concert and heard Mozart’s Requiem. I did not rise warmly to it. Then I heard an extract from Parsifal which I disliked very much. If Bach wriggles, Wagner writhes…

It is by the goodness of God that we have those three unspeakably precious things: freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, and the prudence never to practice either of them.

Achievement brings its own anticlimax.

Surviving is important. Thriving is elegant.

No two men can be half an hour together but one shall acquire an evident superiority over the other.

There is no way to success in art but to take off your coat, grind paint, and work like a digger on the railroad, all day and every day.

The one who prosperity takes too much delight in will be the most shocked by reverses.

No poems can please for long or live that are written by water drinkers.

The knowledge of an unlearned man is living and luxuriant like a forest, but covered with mosses and lichens and for the most part inaccessible and going to waste; the knowledge of the man of science is like timber collected in yards for public works, which still supports a green sprout here and there, but even this is liable to dry rot.

When one has tasted it Watermelon he knows what the angels eat.

Justice delayed is justice denied.

Once you learn to quit, it becomes a habit.