Francis Bacon

Friendship increases in visiting friends, but in visiting them seldom.

They that will not apply new remedies must expect new evils.

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

Images also help me find and realise ideas. I look at hundreds of very different, contrasting images and I pinch details from them, rather like people who eat from other people

He that will not apply new remedies must expect new evils; for time is the greatest innovator.

Wise men make more opportunities than they find.

It is not fair to ask of others what you are not willing to do yourself.

He who does not mind his belly, will hardly mind anything else.

The more I see of the moneyed classes, the more I understand the guillotine.

Nothing is so exhilarating in life as to be shot at with no result.

For every benefit you receive a tax is levied.

Sense shines with a double luster when it is set in humility. An able yet humble man is a jewel worth a kingdom.

Adversity has the effect of eliciting talents, which in prosperous circumstances would have lain dormant.

He is a benefactor of mankind who contracts the great rules of life into short sentences, that may be easily impressed on the memory, and so recur habitually to the mind.

The aim of spiritual life is to awaken a joyful freedom, a benevolent and compassionate heart in spite of everything.

What we call education and culture is for the most part nothing but the substitution of reading for experience, of literature for life, of the obsolete fictitious for the contemporary real.

There must be what Mr. Gladstone many years ago called a blessed act of oblivion. We must all turn our backs upon the horrors of the past. We must look to the future. We cannot afford to drag forward across the years that are to come the hatreds and revenges which have sprung from the injuries of the past.

Might, could, would – they are contemptible auxiliaries.

For a crowd is not company; and faces are but a gallery of pictures; and talk but a tinkling cymbal, where there is no love.

Habit is habit, and not to be flung out of the window by any man, but coaxed downstairs a step at a time.

He will be loved when dead, who was envied when he was living.