Francis Bacon Quotes on Knowledge
Bacon's Novum Organum (1620) presents the founding manifesto of modern inductive science. The Idols of the Mind — idols of the Tribe (innate to human nature), the Cave (peculiar to the individual), the Market (arising from language and social convention), and the Theatre (received philosophical systems) — must first be cleared away. Then a systematic empirical method, ascending in ordered stages from particulars through tables of presence, absence, and degrees, can yield genuine knowledge of nature. The aphoristic Bacon — knowledge is power, the prerogative instances, the great instauration — supplied the early modern scientific revolution with much of its programmatic vocabulary.
Quotes
-
“Knowledge is power.”
Nam et ipsa scientia potestas est. -
“Reading maketh a full man; conference a ready man; and writing an exact man.”
Of Studies -
“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.”
Book I, v, 8 -
Attributed to Francis Bacon:
“A wise man will make more opportunities than he finds.”
-
“Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed.”
Aphorism 3 -
Attributed to Francis Bacon:
“Studies serve for delight, for ornament, and for ability.”
-
“Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested.”
Of Studies -
“I confess that I have as vast contemplative ends , as I have moderate civil ends: for I have taken all knowledge to be my province ; and if I could purge it of two sorts of rovers, whereof the one with frivolous disputations, confutations, and verbosities, the other with blind experiments and auricular traditions and impostures, hath committed so many spoils, I hope I should bring in industrious o”
Letter to William Cecil, 1st Baron Burghley (ca. 1593), published in The Works of Francis Bacon: Baron of Verulam, Viscount St. Alban, and Lord High Chancellor of England , 14 Vols. (1870), James Spedding, Robert L. Ellis, Douglas D. Heath, editors, Vol. VIII, p. 109. See also, for approximate date, Mrs. Henry Pott, Francis Bacon and His Secret Society (1891) p. 114 . -
“Essex's Device (1595)”
The monuments of wit survive the monuments of power . -
“Nam et ipsa scientia potestas est.”
For knowledge itself is power . | Meditationes Sacræ [ Sacred Meditations ] (1597), "De Hæresibus" [Of Heresies] -
“Knowledge, that tendeth but to satisfaction, is but as a courtesan, which is for pleasure, and not for fruit or generation.”
Valerius Terminus: Of the Interpretation of Nature (ca. 1603), in Works , Vol. 1, p. 83; The Works of Francis Bacon (1819), Vol. 2, p. 133