Francis Bacon

Children sweeten labours, but they make misfortunes more bitter.

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.

Wise men make more opportunities than they find.

Who questions much, shall learn much, and retain much.

The subtlety of nature is greater many times over than the subtlety of the senses and understanding.

The serpent if it wants to become the dragon must eat itself.

We must train hard. It’s not about denying a weakness may exist but about denying its right to persist.

Let the stoics say what they please, we do not eat for the good of living, but because the meat is savory and the appetite is keen.

Nobody can bring you peace but yourself.

No man ever believes that the Bible means what it says: He is always convinced that it says what he means.

Little minds have little worries, big minds have no time for worries.

Speech of yourself ought to be seldom and well chosen.

Every wall is a door.

Sir, he throws away his money without thought and without merit. I do not call a tree generous that sheds its fruit at every breeze.

All men are prepared to accomplish the incredible if their ideals are threatened.

Drive a nail home and clinch it so faithfully that you can wake up in the night and think of your work with satisfaction,a work at which you would not be ashamed to invoke the Muse.

Our own life has to be our message.

The greatest lesson in life is to know that even fools are right sometimes.

There is only one thing about which I shall have no regrets when my life ends. I have savored to the full all the small, daily joys. The bright sunshine on the breakfast table; the smell of the air at dusk; the sound of the clock ticking; the light rains that start gently after midnight; the hour when the family come home; Sunday-evening tea before the fire! I have never missed one moment of beauty, not even taken it for granted. Spring, summer, autumn, or winter. I wish I had failed as little in other ways.

The man who leaves money to charity in his will is only giving away what no longer belongs to him.

Errors look so very ugly in persons of small means – one feels they are taking quite a liberty in going astray; whereas people of fortune may naturally indulge in a few delinquencies.