Francis Bacon Quotes on Virtue
Bacon's Essays, Civil and Moral (first edition 1597, expanded 1612 and 1625) supply the most accessible record of his moral and political thought. The essays — on truth, friendship, ambition, envy, gardens, marriage, riches, atheism, revenge — combine classical Stoic and humanist materials with the worldly Machiavellian realism of the courtier and the experimental empiricism of the natural philosopher. The framework is not Christian virtue ethics in the strict sense, nor classical eudaimonism, but a worldly prudence calibrated to the real conditions of seventeenth-century court and political life — the kind of practical wisdom that the philosophical study of human nature, conducted on the same empirical method Bacon proposed for natural philosophy, would supply.
Quotes
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Attributed to Francis Bacon:
“A wise man will make more opportunities than he finds.”
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“Hope is a good breakfast, but a bad supper.”
No. 36 -
Attributed to Francis Bacon:
“The remedy is worse than the disease.”
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“Libraries are as the shrine where all the relics of the ancient saints, full of true virtue, and that without delusion or imposture, are preserved and reposed.”
Wikiquote -
“Nay, number (itself) in armies, importeth not much, where the people is of weak courage ; for (as Virgil saith) it never troubles the wolf how many the sheep be.”
Essays or Counsels Civil and Moral (1597), XXIX: "Of the True Greatness of Kingdoms and Estates. -
“Essays or Counsels Civil and Moral (1597), XXIX: "Of the True Greatness of Kingdoms and Estates.”
Nay, number (itself) in armies, importeth not much, where the people is of weak courage ; for (as Virgil saith) it never troubles the wolf how many the sheep be.