A wise man will make more opportunities than he finds.

The greatest vicissitude of things amongst men, is the vicissitude of sects and religions.

But the idols of the Market Place are the most troublesome of all: idols which have crept into the understanding through their alliances with words and names. For men believe that their reason governs words. But words turn and twist the understanding. This it is that has rendered philosophy and the sciences inactive. Words are mostly cut to the common fashion and draw the distinctions which are most obvious to the common understanding. Whenever an understanding of greater acuteness or more diligent observation would alter those lines to suit the true distinctions of nature, words complain.

First the amendment of their own minds. For the removal of the impediments of the mind will sooner clear the passages of fortune than the obtaining fortune will remove the impediments of the mind.

Even within the most beautiful landscape, in the trees, under the leaves the insects are eating each other; violence is a part of life.

If you dissemble sometimes your knowledge of that you are thought to know, you shall be thought, another time, to know that you know not.

But by far the greatest obstacle to the progress of science and to the undertaking of new tasks and provinces therein is found in this-that men despair and think things impossible.