Francis Bacon

It is a pleasure to stand upon the shore, and to see ships tost upon the sea: a pleasure to stand in the window of a castle, and to see a battle and the adventures thereof below: but no pleasure is comparable to standing upon the vantage ground of truth… and to see the errors, and wanderings, and mists, and tempests, in the vale below.

I hold every man a debtor to his profession.

Money is like muck, not good except it be spread.

As the births of living creatures, at first, are ill-shapen: so are all Innovations, which are the births of time.

None of the affections have been noted to fascinate and bewitch but envy.

We are much beholden to Machiavel and others, that write what men do, and not what they ought to do.

He was at a starting point which makes many a man’s career a fine subject for betting, if there were any gentlemen given to that amusement who could appreciate the complicated probabilities of an arduous purpose, with all the possible thwartings and furtherings of circumstance, all the niceties of inward balance, by which a man swings and makes his point or else is carried headlong.

You cannot kill time without injuring eternity.

The most dangerous people are those who have passion but lack wisdom.

Work and thou canst escape the reward; whether the work be fine or course, planting corn or writing epics, so only it be honest work, done to thine own approbation, it shall earn a reward to the senses as well as to the thought.

A beautiful form is better than a beautiful face; it gives a higher pleasure than statues or pictures; it is the finest of the fine arts.

Big doors swing on little hinges.

Guilt, regret, resentment, sadness and all forms of nonforgiveness are caused by too much past and not enough presence.

It is dangerous to be right in matters on which the established authorities are wrong.

I could not find the world if I searched ten years. I’ve forgotten the road by which I came.

If life must not be taken too seriously, then so neither must death.

Only an inventor knows how to borrow, and every man is or should be an inventor.

Build a system that even a fool can use, and only a fool will want to use it.

It is easier to stay out than get out.

There is no love sincerer than the love of food.

The perch swallows the grub-worm, the pickerel swallows the perch, and the fisherman swallows the pickerel; and so all the chinks in the scale of being are filled.