Francis Bacon

Friends are thieves of time.

That things are changed, and that nothing really perishes, and that the sum of matter remains exactly the same, is sufficiently certain.

Nothing does more hurt in a state than that cunning men pass for wise.

Truth is so hard to tell, it sometimes needs fiction to make it plausible.

Antiquities are history defaced, or some remnants of history which have casually escaped the shipwreck of time.

God has placed no limits to the exercise of the intellect he has given us, on this side of the grave.

We long for an affection altogether ignorant of our faults. Heaven has accorded this to us in the uncritical canine attachment.

The reward of a thing well done is having done it.

In the end, people will judge you anyway, so don’t live our life impressing other – live your life impressing yourself.

You are a constant. Forever in my mind; forever in my heart. It seems that most matter how much I try I can’t get rid of you. You are a thorn, stuck in deep; painful to remove, and even when I do, still I’ll bleed and feel the soreness. It will take time, but it will heal. No matter the pain, I will still dare to pick roses.

The most fatal disease of friendship is gradual decay, or dislike hourly increased by causes too slender for complaint, and too numerous for removal.

Sympathetic people often don’t communicate well, they back reflected images which hide their own depths.

Children demand that their heroes should be freckleless, and easily believe them so: perhaps a first discovery to the contrary is less revolutionary shock to a passionate child than the threatened downfall of habitual beliefs which makes the world seem to totter for us in maturer life.

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

Do what you feel in your heart to be right – for you’ll be criticized anyway.

Tis God gives skill, but not without men’s hand: He could not make Antonio Stradivarius’s violins without Antonio.

It is lamentable, that to be a good patriot one must become the enemy of the rest of mankind.

It is necessary to hope… for hope itself is happiness.

We should be careful to get out of an experience only the wisdom that is in it – and stop there; lest we be like the cat that sits down on a hot stove-lid. She will never sit down on a hot stove-lid again – and that is well; but also she will never sit down on a cold one anymore.

Life consists in what a person is thinking of all day.

If a man will kick a fact out of the window, when he comes back he finds it again in the chimney corner.