Quote #43

:it is the peculiar and perpetual error of the human understanding to be more moved and excited by affirmatives than by negatives:

More from Francis Bacon

  1. The human understanding when it has once adopted an opinion (either as being the received opinion or as being agreeable to itself) draws al…
  2. The human understanding is moved by those things most which strike and enter the mind simultaneously and suddenly, and so fill the imaginat…
  3. The human understanding is of its own nature prone to suppose the existence of more order and regularity in the world than it finds. And th…
  4. The human understanding is unquiet; it cannot stop or rest, and still presses onward, but in vain. Therefore it is that we cannot conceive …
  5. Lastly, there are Idols which have immigrated into men's minds from the various dogmas of philosophies, and also from wrong laws of demonst…
  6. But by far the greatest hindrance and aberration of the human understanding proceeds from the dullness, incompetency, and deceptions of the…
  7. There are also Idols formed by the intercourse and association of men with each other, which I call Idols of the Market Place, on account o…
  8. But the best demonstration by far is experience, if it go not beyond the actual experiment.

All Francis Bacon quotes