Choose the life that is most useful, and habit will make it the most agreeable. – Francis Bacon
Natural abilities are like natural plants, that need pruning by study and studies themselves do give forth directions too much at large, except they be bounded in by experience. – Francis Bacon
In every great time there is some one idea at work which is more powerful than any other, and which shapes the events of the time and determines their ultimate issues. – Francis Bacon
What men have called friendship is only a social arrangement, a mutual adjustment of interests, an interchange of services given and received it is, in sum, simply a business from which those involved propose to derive a steady profit for their own self-love. – Francois de La Rochefoucauld