Francis Bacon Quotes

Good and evil lie close together. Seek no artistic unity in character.

Woman is at once apple and serpent.

The better day, the worse deed.

I do all the evil I can before I learn to shun it? Is it not enough to know the evil to shun it? If not, we should be sincere enough to admit that we love evil too well to give it up.

I'm not an evil person. Nobody's really evil.

To you a pious young girl who goes to mass and communion, seems pretty silly and childish; you take us for innocents... Well, let me tell you, sometimes we know more about evil than people who have only learned to offend God.

His weakness was his belief that evil had boundaries.

What makes Iago evil? Some people ask. I never ask.

We are very wrong to think that some fault or other can exclude virtue, or to consider the alliance of good and evil as a monstrosity or an enigma.

Goodness was more difficult than evil. Evil men knew that more than good men. That's why they became evil. That's why it stuck with them. Evil was for those who could never reach the truth. It was a mask for stupidity and lack of love. Even if people laughed at the notion of goodness, if they found it sentimental, or nostalgic, it didn't matter -- it was none of those things, he said, and it had to be fought for.

For what is evil but good tortured by its own hunger and thirst?

And oft, though wisdom wake, suspicion sleeps At wisdom's gate, and to simplicity Resigns her charge, while goodness thinks no ill Where no ill seems.

The rose is born evil ... but it is pink.

The thing that interests me is the good and evil in everybody. I don't have conventional heroes in the films that I directed, because I believe there's good and evil in everybody.

We know that it is possible to harness desire to many interests, that evil is one form of a desire, and not the nature of it.

God save us always,' I said 'from the innocent and the good.

We find that Good and Evil happen alike to all Men on this Side of the Grave; and as the principle Design of Tragedy is to raise Commiseration and Terror in the Minds of the Audience, we shall defeat this great End, if we always make Virtue and Innocence happy and successful.

If you scratch some saints you will find the devil.

That virtue therefore which is but a youngling in the contemplation of evil, and knows not the utmost that vice promises to her followers, and rejects it, is but a blank virtue, not a pure; her whiteness is but an excremental whiteness.

Saintliness is also a temptation.

Angels are bright still, though the brightest fell. Though all things foul would wear the brows of grace, Yet Grace must still look so.

We act empty and innocent but we are fueled by distortions of lives led in discontent trading misfortunes cause faith is one thing that is hard to deliver it feels funny being free.

a loss of sensibility follows a loss of innocence, at once a penalty and a compensation.