Francis Bacon

He that hath wife and children hath given hostages to fortune, for they are impediments to great enterprises, either of virtue or mischief. Certainly the best works and of greatest merit for the public have proceeded from the unmarried or childless men, which both in affection and means have married and endowed the public. He was reputed one of the wise men that made answer to the question, when a man should marryA young man not yet, an elder man not at all.

Natural abilities are like natural plants; they need pruning by study.

Ipsa Scientia Potestas Est (Knowledge Itself Is Power)

A healthy body is a guest chamber for the soul: a sick body is a prison.

Histories make men wise; poets, witty; the mathematics, subtle; natural philosophy, deep; moral, grave; logic and rhetoric, able to contend.

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

Let the world burn through you. Throw the prism light, white hot, on paper.

You know about a person who deeply interests you more than you can be told. A look, a gesture, an act, which to everybody else is insignificant tells you more about that one than words can.

Chains of habit are too light to be felt until they are too heavy to be broken.

The true artist has the planet for his pedestal; the adventurer, after years of strife, has nothing broader than his shoes.

Every one is a genius, more or less. No one is so physically sound that no part of him will be even a little unsound, and no one is so diseased but that some part of him will be healthy — so no man is so mentally and morally sound, but that he will be in part both mad and wicked; and no man is so mad and wicked but he will be sensible and honourable in part. In like manner there is no genius who is not also a fool, and no fool who is not also a genius.

Intellectual work is misnamed; it is a pleasure, a dissipation, and is its own highest reward.

The savage in man is never quite eradicated.

Women tell men things that they are not likely to find out for themselves.

Men profess to be lovers of music, but for the most part they give no evidence in their opinions and lives that they have heard it.

If a man’s eye is on the Eternal, his intellect will grow.

Death is but crossing the world, as friends do the seas; they live in one another still. For they must needs be present, that love and live in that which is omnipresent. In this divine glass, they see face to face; and their converse is free as well as pure. This is the comfort of friends, that though they may be said to die, yet their friendship and society are, in the best sense, ever present, because immortal.

No real gentleman will tell the naked truth in the presence of ladies.

The mass never comes up to the standard of its best member, but on the contrary degrades itself to a level with the lowest.

Men cease to interest us when we find their limitations.

Take away the danger and remove the restraint, and wayward nature runs free.