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Hope is a good breakfast, but it is a bad supper.
Francis Bacon
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Interpretation

What this quote means

Hope is essential to start the day, but relying on it without action is insufficient later on.

This quote by Francis Bacon highlights the importance of hope as a motivating force to begin our endeavors each day. However, it warns that while hope can inspire us at breakfast—representing new beginnings—it must be complemented by action and pragmatism by the end of the day, suggesting that without effort, hope alone cannot sustain us through challenges.

Themes

HopeActionBeginningEffortPragmatism

In practice

Example use cases

In a motivational speech about pursuing dreams, you might say, 'As Francis Bacon once noted, hope is a good breakfast, but remember to take action by supper.'

More from Francis Bacon

Salomon saith, There is no new thing upon the earth. So that as Plato had an imagination, that all knowledge was but remembrance; so Salomon giveth his sentence, that all novelty is but oblivion.
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Nothing doth more hurt in a state than that cunning men pass for wise.
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Truth emerges more readily from error than from confusion.
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Great art is always a way of concentrating, reinventing what is called fact, what we know of our existence- a reconcentration… tearing away the veils, the attitudes people acquire of their time and earlier time. Really good artists tear down those veils
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Wise men make more opportunities than they find.
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Knowledge and human power are synonymous.
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A little wisdom, now and then

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