Wives are young men's mistresses, companions for middle age, and old men's nurses.
~ Francis Bacon
The worst men often give the best advice.
Acorns were good until bread was found.
The momentous thing in human life is the art of winning the soul to good or evil.
Antiquities are history defaced, or some remnants of history which have casually escaped the shipwreck of time.
Knowledge and human power are synonymous.
God Almighty first planted a garden. And indeed, it is the purest of human pleasures.
God hangs the greatest weights upon the smallest wires.
The desire of excessive power caused the angels to fall the desire of knowledge caused men to fall.
The great end of life is not knowledge but action.
He that hath knowledge spareth his words.
Travel, in the younger sort, is a part of education; in the elder, a part of experience.
Natural abilities are like natural plants, that need pruning by study; and studies themselves do give forth directions too much at large, except they be bounded in by experience.
Truth is a good dog; but always beware of barking too close to the heels of an error, lest you get your brains kicked out.
Truth emerges more readily from error than from confusion.
There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion.
Beauty itself is but the sensible image of the Infinite.
Imagination was given to man to compensate him for what he is not a sense of humor to console him for what he is.
Fashion is only the attempt to realize art in living forms and social intercourse.
Friendship increases in visiting friends, but in visiting them seldom.
Money is like manure, of very little use except it be spread.
If a man's wit be wandering, let him study the mathematics.
It is impossible to love and to be wise.
Wise men make more opportunities than they find.
A prudent question is one-half of wisdom.
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.
Certainly the best works, and of greatest merit for the public, have proceeded from the unmarried, or childless men.
A man that studieth revenge keeps his own wounds green.
Anger makes dull men witty, but it keeps them poor.
Anger is certainly a kind of baseness, as it appears well in the weakness of those subjects in whom it reigns: children, women, old folks, sick folks.
Things alter for the worse spontaneously, if they be not altered for the better designedly.
