Quotes
Quotes - Bacon
Men commonly think according to their inclinations, speak according to their learning and imbibed opinions, but generally act according to custom.
Custom is the principle magistrate of man's life.
It is as natural to die as to be born; and to a little infant, perhaps, the one is as painful as the other.
Men fear Death, as children fear to go in the dark; and as that natural fear in children is increased with tales, so is the other.
I do not believe that any man fears to be dead, but only the stroke of death.
Fortune is like the market, where, many times, if you can stay a little, the price will fall.
There is a cunning which we in England call the turning of the cat in the pan.
It is a miserable state of mind to have few things to desire, and many things to fear.
Discretion of speech is more than eloquence, and to speak agreeably to him with whom we deal is more than to speak in good words, or in good order.
The remedy is worse than the disease.
Philosophy when superficially studied, excites doubt, when thoroughly explored, it dispels it.
Acorns were good till bread was found.
Histories make men wise; poets, witty; the mathematics, subtile; natural philosophy, deep; morals, grave; logic and rhetoric, able to contend.
If a man will begin with certainties, he shall end in doubts, but if he will be content to begin with doubts, he shall end in certainties.
To choose time is to save time.
Mahomet made the people believe that he would call a hill to him, and from the top of it offer up his prayers for the observers of his law. The people assembled; Mahomet called the hill to come to him, again and again, and when the hill stood still, he was never a whit abashed, but said, "If the hill will not come to Mahomet, Mahomet will go to the hill."
Fame is like a river, that beareth up things light and swollen, and drowns things weighty and solid.
If money be not they 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.
The fortune which nobody sees makes a person happy and unenvied.
We see spiders, flies or ants entombed and preserved forever in amber, a more than royal tomb.
It was prettily devised of Aesop: The fly sat upon the axle-tree of the chariot-wheel, and said, What a dust do I raise!
We see how flies, and spiders, and the like, get a sepulchre in amber, more durable than the monument and embalming of the body of any king.
The folly of one man is the fortune of another.
That conceit, elegantly expressed by the Emperor Charles V., in his instructions to the King, his son, "that fortune hath somewhat the nature of a woman, that if she be too much wooed she is the farther off."
Therefore if a man look sharply and attentively, he shall see Fortune: for though she be blind, yet she is not invisible.
