Quotes
Quotes - Bacon
For my name and memory, I leave it to men's charitable speeches, to foreign nations, and to the next ages.
My Lord St. Albans said that Nature did never put her precious jewels into a garret four stories high, and therefore that exceeding tall men had ever very empty heads.
Like the strawberry wives, that laid two or three great strawberries at the mouth of their pot, and all the rest were little ones.
Sir Henry Wotton used to say that critics are like brushers of noblemen's clothes.
Sir Amice Pawlet, when he saw too much haste made in any matter, was wont to say, "Stay a while, that we may make an end the sooner."
Alonso of Aragon was wont to say in commendation of age, that age appears to be best in four things,--old wood best to burn, old wine to drink, old friends to trust, and old authors to read.
Pyrrhus, when his friends congratulated to him his victory over the Romans under Fabricius, but with great slaughter of his own side, said to them, "Yes; but if we have such another victory, we are undone."
Cosmus, Duke of Florence, was wont to say of perfidious friends, that "We read that we ought to forgive our enemies; but we do not read that we ought to forgive our friends."
Cato said the best way to keep good acts in memory was to refresh them with new.
There is a wisdom in this beyond the rules of physic: a man's own observation what he finds good of and what he finds hurt of is the best physic to preserve health.
There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion.
If money be not thy servant, it will be thy master. The covetous man cannot so properly be said to possess wealth, as that may be said to possess him.
Choose the life that is most useful, and habit will make it the most agreeable.
Natural abilities are like natural plants; they need pruning by study.
Death is a friend of ours; and he that is not ready to entertain him is not at home.
They are ill discoverers that think there is no land, when they can see nothing but sea.
Natural abilities are like natural plants; they need pruning by study.
Prosperity is not without many fears and distastes, and Adversity is not without comforts and hopes.
Prosperity doth best discover vice, but adversity doth best discover virtue.
Prosperity is not without many fears and distastes; adversity not without many comforts and hopes.
He that gives good advice, builds with one hand; he that gives good counsel and example, builds with both; but he that gives good admonition and bad example, builds with one hand and pulls down with the other.
There is as much difference between the counsel that a friend giveth, and that a man giveth himself, as there is between the counsel of a friend and a flatterer.
Men of age object too much, consult too long, adventure too little, repent too soon, and seldom drive business home to the full period, but content themselves with a mediocrity of success.
It is a pleasure to stand upon the shore, and to see ships tost upon the sea: a pleasure to stand in the window of a castle, and to see a battle and the adventures thereof below: but no pleasure is comparable to standing upon the vantage ground of truth... and to see the errors, and wanderings, and mists, and tempests, in the vale below.
The wisdom of our ancestors.
