Francis Bacon

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

As the births of living creatures, at first, are ill-shapen: so are all Innovations, which are the births of time.

Small amounts of philosophy lead to atheism, but larger amounts bring us back to God.

By indignities men come to dignities.

For knowledge itself is power.

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

Fame is the perfume of heroic deeds.

The self divides into ten billion distinct illuminating spirits. Distinguish these without falling into names and classifications.

What is the imagination? Only an arm or weapon of the interior energy; only the precursor of the reason.

The empires of the future are the empires of the mind.

My mother had a great deal of trouble with me, but I think she enjoyed it.

He that hath wife and children hath given hostages to fortune; for they are impediments to great enterprises, either of virtue or mischief.

When you are present, you can allow the mind to be as it is without getting entangled in it.

Our instructed vagrancy, which has hardly time to linger by the hedgerows, but runs away early to the tropics, and is at home with palms and banyans –which is nourished on books of travel, and stretches the theatre of its imagination to the Zambesi.

A friend who cannot at a pinch remember a thing or two that never happened is as bad as one who does not know how to forget.

Whatever you do, you need courage. Whatever course you decide upon, there is always someone to tell you that you are wrong. There are always difficulties arising that tempt you to believe your critics are right. To map out a course of action and follow it to an end requires some of the same courage that a soldier needs. Peace has its victories, but it takes brave men and women to win them.

That strong mother doesn’t tell her cub ‘Son, stay weak so the wolves can get you’. She says, ‘Toughen up, this is reality we are living in’.

There is no love sincerer than the love of food.

It really boils down to this: that all life is interrelated. We are all caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.

Anger makes dull men witty – but it keeps them poor.

I am not able to instruct you. I can only tell that I have chosen wrong. I have passed my time in study without experience; in the attainment of sciences which can, for the most part, be but remotely useful to mankind. I have purchased knowledge at the expense of all the common comforts of life: I have missed the endearing elegance of female friendship, and the happy commerce of domestic tenderness.