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.

For knowledge itself is power.

Prosperity is the blessing of the Old Testament; adversity is the blessing of the New.

None of the affections have been noted to fascinate and bewitch but envy.

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.

That things are changed, and that nothing really perishes, and that the sum of matter remains exactly the same, is sufficiently certain.

To be a citizen in a democracy, a human being must be given a healthy start.

I shall not wholly die, and a great part of me will escape the grave.

Fortitude is the marshal of thought, the armor of the will, and the fort of reason.

He who has provoked the shaft of wit, cannot complain that he smarts from it.

Happiness is not a state to arrive at, rather, a manner of traveling.

He that pursues fame with just claims, trusts his happiness to the winds; but he that endeavors after it by false merit, has to fear, not only the violence of the storm, but the leaks of his vessel.

Other men are lenses through which we read our own minds. Each man seeks those of different quality from his own, and such as are good of their kind; that is, he seeks other men, and the rest.

Discord is the great ill of mankind; and tolerance is the only remedy for it.

Dictionaries are like watches, the worst is better than none and the best cannot be expected to go quite true.

Say what you have to say and first time you come to a sentence with a grammatical ending; sit down.

There was never a child so lovely but his mother was glad to get him to sleep.

There is no rule more invariable than that we are paid for our suspicions by finding what we suspect.

I am very fond of truth, but not at all of martyrdom.

It is better to be frightened now than killed hereafter

It was wonderful to find America, but it would have been more wonderful to miss it.