Francis Bacon

Be not penny-wise. Riches have wings. Sometimes they fly away of themselves, and sometimes they must be set flying to bring in more.

Prosperity is not without many fears and distastes; adversity not without many comforts and hopes.

Nakedness is uncomely, as well in mind as body, and it addeth no small reverence to men’s manners and actions if they be not altogether open. Therefore set it down: That a habit of secrecy is both politic and moral.

Wives are young men’s mistresses, companions for middle age, and old men’s nurses.

Fame is like a river, that beareth up things light and swollen, and drowns things weighty and solid.

The person is a poor judge who by an action can be disgraced more in failing than they can be honored in succeeding.

But the mother’s yearning, that completest type of the life in another life which is the essence of real human love, feels the presence of the cherished child even in the debased, degraded man.

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

Leisure may be defined as free activity, labor as compulsory activity. Leisure does what it likes, labor does what it must, the compulsion being that of Nature, which in these latitudes leaves men no choice between labor and starvation.

Without friends the world is but a wilderness. There is no man that imparteth his joys to his friends, but he joyeth the more; and no man that imparteth his grieves to his friend, but he grieveth the less.

The hottest love has the coldest end.

I could never be content to take my place by the fireside and simply look on. Life was meant to be lived, and curiosity must be kept alive. One must never, for whatever reason, turn his back on life.

To different minds, the same world is a hell, and a heaven.

There are thousands hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root.

We gain the strength of the temptation we resist.

If you find it in your heart to care for somebody else, you will have succeeded.

Lest I keep my complacent way I must remember somewhere out there a person died for me today. As long as there must be war, I ask and I must answer was I worth dying for?

He does not care for flowers. Calls them rubbish, and cannot tell one from another, and thinks it is superior to feel like that.

It is the flash which appears, the thunderbolt will follow.

No man thoroughly understands a truth until he has contended against it.

I am not much an advocate for traveling, and I observe that men run away to other countries because they are not good in their own, and run back to their own because they pass for nothing in the new places. For the most part, only the light characters travel. Who are you that have no task to keep you at home?