Francis Bacon

Histories make men wise; poets, witty; the mathematics, subtle; natural philosophy, deep; moral, grave; logic and rhetoric, able to contend.

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

Natural abilities are like natural plants; they need pruning by study.

Rebellions of the belly are the worst.

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

Seek ye first the good things of the mind, and the rest will either be supplied or its loss will not be felt.

I love to be alone. I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude.

Morality is suspecting other people of not being legally married.

I always like people who have developed long and hard, particularly through introspection and a lot of dedication. I think that what they arrive at is, usually, deeper and more beautiful than the person who seems to have that ability and fluidity from the beginning.

You have such strong words at command, that they make the smallest argument seem formidable.

If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.

The two parties which divide the state, the party of Conservatism and that of Innovation, are very old, and have disputed the possession of the world ever since it was made.

However small the chance might be of striking lucky, the chance is there. The chance had to be there.

It is a curious sensation: the sort of pain that goes mercifully beyond our powers of feeling. When your heart is broken, your boats are burned: nothing matters any more. It is the end of happiness and the beginning of peace.

I have no doubt that it is a part of the destiny of the human race, in its gradual improvement, to leave off eating animals, as surely as the savage tribes have left off eating each other when they came in contact with the more civilized.

Lexicographer: a writer of dictionaries, a harmless drudge, that busies himself in tracing the original, and detailing the signification of words.

Man can climb to the highest summits, but he cannot dwell there long.

There is always a best way of doing everything.

There are innumerable questions to which the inquisitive mind can in this state receive no answer: Why do you and I exist? Why was this world created? Since it was to be created, why was it not created sooner?

It may be that we shall, by a process of sublime irony, have reached a stage in this story where safety will be the sturdy child of terror, and survival the twin brother of annihilation.

The need for change bulldozed road down the center of my mind.