Francis Bacon

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

All of our actions take their hue from the complexion of the heart, as landscapes their variety from light.

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

The remedy is worse than the disease.

A man must make his opportunity, as oft as find it.

To be free minded and cheerfully disposed at hours of meat and sleep and of exercise is one of the best precepts of long lasting.

The greatest evils and the worst of crimes is poverty; our first duty, a duty to which every other consideration should be sacrificed, is not to be poor.

I would advise you Sir, to study algebra, if you are not already an adept in it: your head would be less muddy, and you will leave off tormenting your neighbors about paper and packthread, while we all live together in a world that is bursting with sin and sorrow.

I cannot see how a man of any large degree of humorous perception can ever be religious – except he purposely shut the eyes of his mind and keep them shut by force.

Resolve not to be poor: whatever you have, spend less. Poverty is a great enemy to human happiness; it certainly destroys liberty, and it makes some virtues impracticable, and others extremely difficult.

Life grants nothing to us mortals without hard work.

My liver swells with bile difficult to repress.

Life isn’t as serious as the mind makes it out to be.

Wisdom is better than silver and gold. I was hopeless, now I’m on hope road.

A man cannot be said to succeed in this life who does not satisfy one friend.

All that I have seen teaches me to trust the Creator for all I have not seen.

We are long before we are convinced that happiness is never to be found; and each believes it possessed by others, to keep alive the hope of obtaining it for himself.

Excellence must be pursued, it must be wooed with all of one’s might and every bit of effort that we have each day there’s a new encounter, each week is a new challenge.

Always acknowledge a fault. This will throw those in authority off their guard and give you an opportunity to commit more.

Youth is wasted on the young.

Plain question and plain answer make the shortest road out of most perplexities.