FrancisBacon

Bacon stands at the crossroads of faith, reason, and practice: he treated Scripture and Nature as God’s “two books,” unmasked human bias with his Idols of the Mind, and wrote essays that cut through illusion to truth—making him feel less like a distant philosopher and more like a pragmatic, like-min

Batch Batchelder

Reading maketh a full man; conference a ready man; and writing an exact man; and, therefore, if 268a man write little, he had need have a great memory; if he confer little, he had need have a present wit; and if he read little, he had need have much cunning, to seem to know that he doth not.

“Optimum elige, suave et facile illud faciet consuetudo.”

“Choose the best, and habit will make it pleasant and easy.”

Optimum elige = Choose the best.
suave et facile = pleasant and easy.
illud faciet consuetudo = habit/custom will make it so.

It’s a classical maxim on the power of habit: what is hard at first becomes natural and even delightful through repeated practice.

no receipt openeth the heart but a true friend, to whom you may impart griefs, joys, fears, hopes, suspicions, counsels, and whatsoever lieth upon the heart to oppress it, in a kind of civil shrift or confession.

it is a mere and miserable solitude to want true friends, without which the world is but a wilderness

But little do men perceive what solitude is, and how far it extendeth; for a crowd is not company, and faces are but a gallery of pictures, and talk but a tinkling cymbal, where there is no love.

this communicating of a man’s self to his friend works two contrary effects, for it redoubleth joys, and cutteth griefs in halves; for there is no man that imparteth his joys to his friend, but he joyeth the more; and no man that imparteth his griefs to his friend, but he grieveth the less.

Certainly it is heaven upon earth, to have a man’s mind move in charity, rest in providence, and turn upon the poles of truth.

the best preservative to keep the mind in health, is the faithful admonition of a friend. The calling of a man’s self to a strict account is a medicine sometimes too piercing and corrosive; reading good books of morality is a little flat and dead; observing our faults in others is sometimes improper for our case; but the best receipt (best, I say,... See more

there is as much difference between the counsel that a friend giveth, and that a man giveth himself, as there is between the counsel of a friend and of a flatterer; for there is no such flatterer as is a man’s self, and there is no such remedy against flattery of a man’s self, as the liberty of a friend.