Francis Bacon

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

This is the foundation of all. We are not to imagine or suppose, but to discover, what nature does or may be made to do.

He that gives good advice builds with one hand; he that gives good counsel and example builds with both.

People usually think according to their inclinations, speak according to their learning and ingrained opinions, but generally act according to custom.

If a man be gracious and courteous to strangers, it shows he is a citizen of the world.

Discretion of speech is more than eloquence, and to speak agreeably to him with whom we deal is more than to speak in good words, or in good order.

It is a mistake to look too far ahead. Only one link in the chain of destiny can be handled at a time.

I have never felt that anything really mattered but knowing that you stood for the things in which you believed and had done the very best you could.

When I hear the hypercritical quarreling about grammar and style, the position of the particles, etc., etc., stretching or contracting every speaker to certain rules of theirs. I see that they forget that the first requisite and rule is that expression shall be vital and natural, as much as the voice of a brute or an interjection: first of all, mother tongue; and last of all, artificial or father tongue. Essentially your truest poetic sentence is as free and lawless as a lamb’s bleat.

To keep your secret is wisdom, but to expect others to keep it is folly.

Depend upon it that if a man talks of his misfortunes there is something in them that is not disagreeable to him; for where there is nothing but pure misery there never is any recourse to the mention of it.

Let your literary compositions be kept from the public eye for nine years.

It is an interesting question how far men would retain their relative rank if they were divested of their clothes.

Prejudice is a burden that confuses the past, threatens the future and renders the present inaccessible.

Words mean more than what is set down on paper. It takes the human voice to infuse them with deeper meaning.

If a madman were to come into this room with a stick in his hand, no doubt we should pity the state of his mind; but our primary consideration would be to take care of ourselves. We should knock him down first, and pity him afterwards.

The quality of the imagination is to flow and not to freeze.

The beginning of compunction is the beginning of a new life.

I hate this shallow Americanism which hopes to get rich by credit, to get knowledge by raps on midnight tables, to learn the economy of the mind by phrenology, or skill without study, or mastery without apprenticeship.

Opinion has caused more trouble on this little earth than plagues or earthquakes.

Society never advances. It recedes as fast on one side as it gains on the other. Society acquires new arts, and loses old instincts.