Francis Bacon

Fortune is like the market, where, many times, if you can stay a little, the price will fall.

A healthy body is a guest chamber for the soul: a sick body is a prison.

For my name and memory I leave to men’s charitable speeches, and to foreign nations and the next ages.

Suspicion amongst thoughts are like bats amongst birds, they never fly by twilight.

Philosophers make imaginary laws for imaginary commonwealths, and their discourses are as the stars, which give little light because they are so high.

By indignities men come to dignities.

Things do not change; we change.

One of the most striking differences between a cat and a lie is that a cat has only nine lives.

The search after the great men is the dream of youth, and the most serious occupation of manhood.

There is no life I know to compare with pure imagination. Living there, you’ll be free if you truly wish to be.

It’s not the size of the dog in the fight, it’s the size of the fight in the dog.

The whole history of the world is summed up in the fact that, when nations are strong, they are not always just, and when they wish to be just, they are no longer strong.

Sorrow is a kind of rust of the soul, which every new idea contributes in its passage to scour away. It is the putrefaction of stagnant life, and is remedied by exercise and motion.

Don’t be a cynic and disconsolate preacher. Don’t bewail and moan. Omit the negative propositions. Challenge us with incessant affirmatives. Don’t waste yourself in rejection, or bark against the bad, but chant the beauty of the good.

The virtues of society are vices of the saint. The terror of reform is the discovery that we must cast away our virtues, or what we have always esteemed such, into the same pit that has consumed our grosser vices.

Success must include two things: the development of an individual to his utmost potentiality and a contribution of some kind to one’s world.

God hangs the greatest weights upon the smallest wires.

Our humanity comes to its fullest bloom in giving. We become beautiful people when we give whatever we can give: a smile, a handshake, a kiss, an embrace, a word of love, a present, a part of our life…all of our life.

A system of morality which is based on relative emotional values is a mere illusion, a thoroughly vulgar conception which has nothing sound in it and nothing true.

A man seldom thinks with more earnestness of anything than he does of his dinner.

What a wee little part of a person’s life are his acts and his words! His real life is led in his head, and is known to none but himself. All day long, the mill of his brain is grinding, and his thoughts, not those of other things, are his history. These are his life, and they are not written. Everyday would make a whole book of 80,000 words – 365 books a year. Biographies are but the clothes and buttons of the man – the biography of the man himself cannot be written.