Francis Bacon

He that gives good advice builds with one hand; he that gives good counsel and example builds with both.

Opportunity makes a thief.

I had rather believe all the Fables in the Legend, and the Talmud, and the Alcoran, than that this universal frame is without a Mind.

All colors will agree in the dark.

Fortitude is the marshal of thought, the armor of the will, and the fort of reason.

Acorns were good until bread was found.

I suppose every old scholar has had the experience of reading something in a book which was significant to him, but which he could never find again. Sure he is that he read it there, but no one else ever read it, nor can he find it again, though he buy the book and ransack every page.

Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm.

It is dangerous to be sincere unless you are also stupid.

Say a word, say a thousand to me on the telephone and I shall choose the wrong one to cling to as though you had said it after long deliberation when only I provoked it from you, I will cling to it from among a thousand, to be provoked and hurl it back with something I mean no more than you meant that, something for you to cling to and retreat clinging to.

We live by our imagination, our admirations, and our sentiments.

I do then with my friends as I do with my books. I would have them where I can find them, but I seldom use them.

A short letter to a distant friend is, in my opinion, an insult like that of a slight bow or cursory salutation — a proof of unwillingness to do much, even where there is a necessity of doing something.

Let us, if we must have great actions, make our own so. All action is of infinite elasticity, and the least admits of being inflated with celestial air, until it eclipses the sun and moon.

Knowledge and human power are synonymous.

Rebellions of the belly are the worst.

A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep.

The correlative to loving our neighbors as ourselves is hating ourselves as we hate our neighbors.

The greatest glory in living lies in never falling, but in rising every time we fall.

Never do anything by halves if you want to get away with it. Be outrageous. Go the whole hog. Make sure everything you do is so completely crazy it’s unbelievable.

But that intimacy of mutual embarrassment, in which each feels that the other is feeling something, having once existed, its effect is not to be done away with.