Francis Bacon

There is nothing makes a man suspect much, more than to know little, and therefore men should remedy suspicion by procuring to know more, and not keep their suspicions in smother.

The best part of beauty is that which no picture can express.

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

Judges ought to be more learned than witty, more reverent than plausible, and more advised than confident. Above all things, integrity is their portion and proper virtue.

Pictures and shapes are but secondary objects and please or displease only in the memory.

Money is like manure, of very little use except it be spread.

The price of greatness is responsibility.

I can be changed by what happens to me. But I refuse to be reduced by it.

All endeavor calls for the ability to tramp the last mile, shape the last plan, endure the last hours toil. The fight to the finish spirit is the one… characteristic we must posses if we are to face the future as finishers.

Remember who you are.

The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want and if they can’t find them, make them.

Cities give us collision. ‘Tis said, London and New York take the nonsense out of a man.

With memory set smarting like a reopened wound, a man’s past is not simply a dead history, an outworn preparation of the present: it is not a repented error shaken loose from the life: it is a still quivering part of himself, bringing shudders and bitter flavors and the tinglings of a merited shame.

Hell is full of musical amateurs: music is the brandy of the damned.

Knowledge always demands increase; it is like fire, which must first be kindled by some external agent, but will afterwards always propagate itself.

Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that if the British Empire and Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, This was their finest hour.

It is better to suffer wrong than to do it, and happier to be sometimes cheated than not to trust.

Accept your genius and say what you think.

The newspaper that obstructs the law on a trivial pretext, for money’s sake, is a dangerous enemy to the public weal.That awful power, the public opinion of a nation, is created in America by a horde of ignorant, self-complacent simpletons who failed at ditching and shoemaking and fetched up in journalism on their way to the poorhouse.

I pack my trunk, embrace my friends, embark on the sea and at last wake up in Naples, and there beside me is the stern fact, the sad self, unrelenting, identical, that I fled from.

There are people who can do all fine and heroic things but one – keep from telling their happiness to the unhappy.