Lord Bacon Quotes

• Lord Bacon told Sir Edward Coke when he was boasting, The less you speak of your greatness, the more shall I think of it.

  William Shakespeare

  Greatness, Thinking, Coke

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• Mere negation, mere Epicurean infidelity, as Lord Bacon most justly observes, has never disturbed the peace of the world. It furnishes no motive for action; it inspires no enthusiasm; it has no missionaries, no crusades, no martyrs.

  Thomas B. Macaulay

  Inspire, Infidelity, World

  "Ranke's History of the Popes" by Thomas B. Macaulay, "Edinburgh Review", October, 1840.

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• History without the history of science, to alter slightly an apothegm of Lord Bacon, resembles a statue of Polyphemus without his eye-that very feature being left out which most marks the spirit and life of the person. My own thesis is complementary: science taught ... without a sense of history is robbed of those very qualities that make it worth teaching to the student of the humanities and the social sciences.

  I. Bernard Cohen

  Life, Teaching, Eye

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• Lord Bacon makes beauty to consist of grace and motion.

  Mary Wortley Montagu

  Beauty, Grace, Lord

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• Lord Bacon has compared those who move in higher spheres to those heavenly bodies in the firmament, which have much admiration, but little rest. And it is not necessary to invest a wise man with power to convince him that it is a garment bedizened with gold, which dazzles the beholder by its splendor, but oppresses the wearer by its weight.

  Charles Caleb Colton

  Wise, Moving, Men

  Charles Caleb Colton (1832). “Lacon: Or Many Things in Few Words, Addressed to Those who Think”, p.94

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• Books, says Lord Bacon, can never teach us the use of books; the student must learn by commerce with mankind to reduce his speculations to practice. No man should think so highly of himself as to think he can receive but little light from books; no one so meanly, as to believe he can discover nothing but what is to be learned from them.

  Samuel Johnson

  Believe, Book, Men

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• The mere power of saving what is already in our hands must be of easy acquisition to every mind; and as the example of Lord Bacon may show that the highest intellect cannot safely neglect it, a thousand instances every day prove that the humblest may practise it with success.

  Samuel Johnson

  Hands, Mind, Example

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• Lord Bacon could as easily have created the planets as he could have written Hamlet.

  Thomas Carlyle

  Lord, Planets, Written

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