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.

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

Ask counsel of both timesof the ancient time what is best, and of the latter time what is fittest.

Atheism is rather in the lip than in the heart of man.

I would live to study, and not study to live.

Judges must beware of hard constructions and strained inferences, for there is no worse torture than that of laws.

The finest qualities of our nature, like the bloom on fruits, can be preserved only by the most delicate handling. Yet we do not treat ourselves nor one another thus tenderly.

Anger is short madness

Our best history is still poetry.

How pleasant it is for a father to sit at his child’s board. It is like an aged man reclining under the shadow of an oak which he has planted.

I feel nothing but the accursed happiness I have dreaded all my life long: the happiness that comes as life goes, the happiness of yielding and dreaming instead of resisting and doing, the sweetness of the fruit that is going rotten.

Martyrdom is the only way a man can become famous without ability.

Such is the state of life, that none are happy but by the anticipation of change: the change itself is nothing; when we have made it, the next wish is to change again.

Can anybody remember when the times were not hard, and money not scarce?

Sorrow makes us children again.

Haven’t you learned yet that I put something more than whisky into my speeches.

People of great position are servants times three, servants of their country, servants of fame, and servants of business.

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

The only living works are those which have drained much of the author’s own life into them.

The secret in education lies in respecting the student.

Its proper use is to amuse the idle, and relax the studious, and dilute the full meals of those who cannot use exercise, and will not use abstinence.