Francis Bacon

It is a strange desire, to seek power, and to lose liberty; or to seek power over others, and to lose power over a man's self.

I do not believe that any man fears to be dead, but only the stroke of death.

Read not to contradict and confute, nor to believe and take for granted... but to weigh and consider.

Fashion is only the attempt to realize art in living forms and social intercourse.

Revenge is a kind of wild justice, which the more a man's nature runs to, the more ought law to weed it out.

Man, as the minister and interpreter of nature, is limited in act and understanding by his observation of the order of nature; neither his understanding nor his power extends further.

Virtue is like a rich stone, best plain set.

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.

He that hath wife and children hath given hostages to fortune; for they are impediments to great enterprises, either of virtue or mischief.

Fortune is like the market, where, many times, if you can stay a little, the price will fall.

O life! An age to the miserable, a moment to the happy.

Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed.

Fame is like a river, that beareth up things light and swollen, and drowns things weighty and solid.

For no man can forbid the spark nor tell whence it may come.

There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion.

Write down the thoughts of the moment. Those that come unsought for are commonly the most valuable.

Seek ye first the good things of the mind, and the rest will either be supplied or its loss will not be felt.

For many parts of Nature can neither be invented with sufficient subtlety, nor demonstrated with sufficient perspicuity, nor accommodated unto use with sufficient dexterity, without the aid and intervening of the mathematics, of which sort are perspective, music, astronomy, cosmography, architecture, engineery, and divers others.

The pencil of the Holy Ghost hath labored more in describing the afflictions of Job than the felicities of Solomon.

It is as hard and severe a thing to be a true politician as to be truly moral.

The subtlety of nature is greater many times over than the subtlety of the senses and understanding.