Francis Bacon

1561–1626 · English philosopher and statesman

Topics: learning, debugging, engineering leadership, creativity

• Books must follow sciences, and not sciences books.

  — Francis Bacon

• Those who have taken upon them to lay down the law of nature as a thing already searched out and understood, whether they have spoken in simple assurance or professional affectation, have therein done philosophy and the sciences great injury.

  — Francis Bacon

• Learning hath his infancy, when it is but beginning and almost childish; then his youth, when it is luxuriant and juvenile; then his strength of years, when it is solid and reduced; and lastly his old age, when it waxeth dry and exhaust.

  — Francis Bacon

• By far the greatest hindrance and aberration of the human understanding proceeds from the dullness, incompetency, and deceptions of the senses

  — Francis Bacon

• Human knowledge and human power meet in one; for where the cause is not known the effect cannot be produced. Nature to be commanded must be obeyed; and that which in contemplation is as the cause is in operation as the rule.

  — Francis Bacon

• Knowledge, that tendeth but to satisfaction, is but as a courtesan, which is for pleasure, and not for fruit or generation.

  — Francis Bacon

• It is not possible to run a course aright when the goal itself has not been rightly placed.

  — Francis Bacon

• The human understanding is of its own nature prone to suppose the existence of more order and regularity in the world than it finds.

  — Francis Bacon

• Man, being the servant and interpreter of Nature, can do and understand so much and so much only as he has observed in fact or in thought of the course of nature. Beyond this he neither knows anything nor can do anything.

  — Francis Bacon

• I have taken all knowledge to be my province

  — Francis Bacon

• Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested; that is, some books are to be read only in parts; others to be read, but not curiously; and some few to be read wholly, and with diligence and attention.

  — Francis Bacon

• Let great authors have their due, as time, which is the author of authors, be not deprived of his due, which is, further and further to discover truth.

  — Francis Bacon

• Truth will sooner come out from error than from confusion.

  — Francis Bacon

• 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.

  — Francis Bacon

• It would be an unsound fancy and self-contradictory to expect that things which have never yet been done can be done except by means which have never yet been tried.

  — Francis Bacon

• But the best demonstration by far is experience, if it go not beyond the actual experiment.

  — Francis Bacon

• The logic now in use serves rather to fix and give stability to the errors which have their foundation in commonly received notions than to help the search for truth. So it does more harm than good.

  — Francis Bacon

• For all knowledge and wonder (which is the seed of knowledge) is an impression of pleasure in itself.

  — Francis Bacon

• Moreover the works already known are due to chance and experiment rather than to sciences; for the sciences we now possess are merely systems for the nice ordering and setting forth of things already invented; not methods of invention or directions for new works.

  — Francis Bacon

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

  — Francis Bacon