Francis Bacon Quotes

To spend too much time in studies is sloth.

If you spend a whole afternoon just eating popcorn and watching football, there's absolutely nothing wrong with that. But if that's all you do, you get swept along with the tide, without any idea of where you're going.

I do think all things in moderation. I mean, the thing to me - it actually doesn't bother me very much if people want to read chick lit. But it makes me, you know, sort of disheartened when that's all that people want to read.

I'm not a fan of idleness, except in small doses.

My philosophy is 'learn while you live.' 'LazyTown' is about balance. I'm not there yet.

Reason is a harmonising, controlling force rather than a creative one.

By all means let's be open-minded, but not so open-minded that our brains drop out.

If one age believes too much it is natural that another believes too little.

I don't mean to criticize anyone in any way that I wouldn't criticize myself. I think people should have fun, and have a good time, and enjoy the luck that we have to be lazy and dwell in consumerism. But I think that it's a balance. And our job as actors is empathy.

Less judgment than wit is more sail than ballast.

Master books, but do not let them master you. Read to live, not live to read.

I've always liked working really hard and then doing nothing in particular. So, consequently, I didn't overexpose myself; I guess I maintained a kind of mystery. I wasn't ambitious.

Why waste time learning, when ignorance is instantaneous?

President Bush should learn to focus on the shades of grey

The men with the muckrakes are often indispensable but only if they know when to stop raking muck.

I'm not the kind of person who works 24 hours a day, mostly out of laziness; I don't know.

The intellectual ... may live for ideas, as I have said, but something must prevent him from living for one idea, from becoming obsessive or grotesque. Although there have been zealots whom we may still regard as intellectuals, zealotry is a defect of the breed and not of the essence.

He that believes all misseth; he that believes nothing, hits not.

We have more than two options. A critique of reason does not have to be a call for the return of superstition and arbitrary power. Our problems do not lie with reason itself but with our obsessive treatment of reason as an absolute value. Certainly it is one of our qualities, but it functions positively only when balanced and limited by the others.

I learn to be kind of balanced, because when I was a teenager and in my early 20s, I would get very involved with political issues and stuff like that. And now, I still have an opinion on everything, but I try to balance staying informed and having a positive attitude.

It is simply untrue that all our institutions are evil,... that all politicians are mere opportunists, that all aspects of university life are corrupt. Having discovered an illness, it's not terribly useful to prescribe death as a cure.

The abuse of grace is affectation, as the abuse of the sublime is absurdity; all perfection is nearly a fault.

A man who knows how to mix pleasures with business is never entirely possessed by them; he either quits or resumes them at his will; and in the use he makes of them he rather finds a relaxation than a dangerous charm that might corrupt him.

One cannot be avenged for every wrong; according to the occasion, everyone who knows how, must use temperance.

Work first and then rest. Work first, and then gaze, but do not use golden ploughshares, nor bind ledgers in enamel.