Francis Bacon

God hangs the greatest weights upon the smallest wires.

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

The fortune which nobody sees makes a person happy and unenvied.

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

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 way of fortune is like the milkyway in the sky; which is a number of small stars, not seen asunder, but giving light together: so it is a number of little and scarce discerned virtues, or rather faculties and customs, that make men fortunate.

When I was praised I lost my time, for instantly I turned around to look at the work I had thought slightly of, and that day I made nothing new.

Love grows. Lust wastes by Enjoyment, and the Reason is, that one springs from an Union of Souls, and the other from an Union of Sense.

Do not do to others what angers you if done to you by others.

The god of victory is said to be one-handed, but peace gives victory on both sides.

Change does not roll in on the wheels of inevitability, but comes through continuous struggle. And so we must straighten our backs and work for our freedom. A man can’t ride you unless your back is bent.

Tread softly, Breathe peacefully, Laugh hysterically.

The success of great scholars and thinkers is commonly a courtier-like success, not kingly, not manly.

All meanings, we know, depend on the key of interpretation.

By avarice and selfishness, and a groveling habit, from which none of us is free, of regarding the soil as property, or the means of acquiring property chiefly, the landscape is deformed, husbandry is degraded with us, and the farmer leads the meanest of lives. He knows Nature but as a robber.

Perhaps the greatest social service that can be rendered by anybody to the country and to mankind is to bring up a family.

Let your family, staff, and friends know that you’re still the same person, despite all the publicity and notoriety that accompanies your position.

The moment we indulge our affections, the earth is metamorphosed, there is no winter and no night; all tragedies, all ennui s, vanish, all duties even.

Every quotation contributes something to the stability or enlargement of the language.

Every man who attacks my belief, diminishes in some degree my confidence in it, and therefore makes me uneasy; and I am angry with him who makes me uneasy.

If you have good thoughts, they will shine out of your face like sunbeams and you will always look lovely.