Francis Bacon

Lies are sufficient to breed opinion, and opinion brings on substance.

The serpent if it wants to become the dragon must eat itself.

Of all virtues and dignities of the mind, goodness is the greatest, being the character of the Deity; and without it, man is a busy, mischievous, wretched thing.

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

It is as hard and severe a thing to be a true politician as to be truly moral.

He that hath wife and children hath given hostages to fortune, for they are impediments to great enterprises, either of virtue or mischief. Certainly the best works and of greatest merit for the public have proceeded from the unmarried or childless men, which both in affection and means have married and endowed the public. He was reputed one of the wise men that made answer to the question, when a man should marryA young man not yet, an elder man not at all.

He is now rising from affluence to poverty.

Paradise was made for tender hearts; hell, for loveless hearts.

There is no love sincerer than the love of food.

My life is a struggle.

The two offices of memory are collection and distribution.

Them meaning of good and bad, of better and worse, is simply helping or hurting.

Worldly faces never look so worldly as at a funeral. They have the same effect of grating incongruity as the sound of a coarse voice breaking the solemn silence of night.

Do Good with what thou hast, or it will do thee no good.

Revenge is the act of passion, vengeance is an act of justice.

We have a criminal jury system which is superior to any in the world; and its efficiency is only marred by the difficulty of finding twelve men every day who don’t know anything and can’t read.

Aim for the moon. If you miss, you may hit a star.

If I have said something to hurt a man once, I shall not get the better of this by saying many things to please him.

Nature arms each man with some faculty which enables him to do easily some feat impossible to any other.

But lo! men have become the tools of their tools.

Only trust thyself, and another shall not betray thee.