Sir Francis Bacon Quotes

Reading maketh a full man, conference a ready man, and writing an exact man.

Truth is a naked and open daylight, Truth which only doth judge itself, teacheth that the enquiry of truth, which is the love-making or wooing of it, and the belief of truth, which is the presence of it, and the belief of truth, which is the enjoying of it, is the sovereign good of human nature.

This is the foundation of all. We are not to imagine or suppose, but to discover, what nature does or may be made to do.

It is not what we eat but what we digest that makes us strong; not what we gain but what we save that makes us rich; not what we read but what we remember that makes us learned; and not what we profess but what we practice that gives us integrity.

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's plates.

If a man be gracious and courteous to strangers, it shows he is a citizen of the world, and that his heart is no island cut off from other lands, but a continent that joins to them.

Important families are like potatoes. The best parts are underground.

The men of experiment are like the ant, they only collect and use; the reasoners resemble spiders, who make cobwebs out of their own substance. But the bee takes the middle course: it gathers its material from the flowers of the garden and field, but transforms and digests it by a power of its own. Not unlike this is the true business of philosophy (science); for it neither relies solely or chiefly on the powers of the mind, nor does it take the matter which it gathers from natural history and mechanical experiments and lay up in the memory whole, as it finds it, but lays it up in the understanding altered and disgested. Therefore, from a closer and purer league between these two faculties, the experimental and the rational (such as has never been made), much may be hoped.

He that gives good advice builds with one hand; he that gives good counsel and example builds with both.

Atheism leaves a man to sense, to philosophy, to natural piety, to laws, to reputation; all of which may be guides to an outward moral virtue, even if religion vanished; but religious superstition dismounts all these and erects an absolute monarchy in the minds of men.

There is no great concurrence between learning and wisdom.