Francis Bacon Quotes

After all, why be good? How many will actually believe it of us?

...virtue is not merely a state in conformity with the right principle, but one that implies the right principle; and the right principle in moral conduct is prudence.

To do evil for good is human corruption; to do good for good is civil retribution; but to do good for evil is Christian perfection. Though this be not the grace of nature, it is the nature of grace.

What is the real relation between happiness and goodness? It is only within a few generations that men have found courage to say that there is none.

One’s concern with the ethics of means and ends varies inversely with one’s personal interest in the issue.

Vices and virtues are of a strange nature, for the more we have, the fewer we think we have.

It still remains true that no justification of virtue will enable a man to be virtuous.

Without virtue, happiness cannot be.

The absence of vices adds so little to the sum of one's virtues.

Hypocrisy is an homage that vice renders to virtue.

Virtue is nothing but an act of loving that which is to be beloved, and that act is prudence, from whence not to be removed by constraint is fortitude; not to be allured by enticements is temperance; not to be diverted by pride is justice.

If the Coastal Republic had believed in the existence of virtue, it could at least have aspired to hypocrisy.

Virtue and vice are not arbitrary things; but there is a natural and eternal reason for goodness and virtue, and against vice and wickedness.

The vices enter into the composition of the virtues, as poisons into that of medicines. Prudence collects and arranges them, and uses them beneficially against the ills of life.

What is in reality cowardice and faithlessness, we call charity, and consider it the part of benevolence sometimes to forgive men's evil practice for the sake of their accurate faith, and sometimes to forgive their confessed heresy for the sake of their admirable practice.

We know that the exercise of virtue should be its own reward, and it seems to follow that the enduring of it on the part of the patient should be its own punishment.

The whole of virtue consists in its practice.

My moral standing is lying down.

The act of defending any of the cardinal virtues has today all the exhilaration of a vice.

Temptations make one very censorious. If you are virtuous you condemn the wicked and if you are wicked, you condemn the virtuous.

The end of all moral speculations is to teach us our duty; and, by proper representations of the deformity of vice and beauty of virtue, beget correspondent habits, and engage us to avoid the one, and embrace the other.

It is much more intelligent, more practical, to be good rather than evil.