Francis Bacon Quotes

I don't have to have faith, I have experience.

The only source of knowledge is experience.

Sometimes experience trumps assumption.

Truth is what stands the test of experience.

Advice maybe wrong, but examples prove themselves.

Rhetoric and dialectics can't change what I have learned from observation and experience.

Men have no better guidance than examples and facts proved by experience.

[It's] troubling because it reminds us how difficult it is to prove anything. We like to pretend that our experiments define the truth for us. But that's often not the case. Just because an idea is true doesn't mean it can be proved. And just because an idea can be proved doesn't mean it's true. When the experiments are done, we still have to choose what to believe.

Knowledge can only be got in one way, the way of experience; there is no other way to know.

The word of knowledge, strictly employed, implies three things: truth, proof, and conviction.

I believe in things that have proof.

Even facts become fictions without adequate ways of seeing "the facts". We do not need theories so much as the experience that is the source of the theory. We are not satisfied with faith, in the sense of an implausible hypothesis irrationally held: we demand to experience the "evidence".

The test of all knowledge is experiment.

For nothing ought to be posited without a reason given, unless it is self-evident (literally, known through itself) or known by experience or proved by the authority of Sacred Scripture.

A great deal more is known than has been proved.

Years teach us more than books.

Those who never make mistakes lose a great many chances to learn something

If you've got the truth you can demonstrate it. Talking doesn't prove it.

At issue is not only knowledge of the world but our survival as individuals and as a species. All the basic technologies ever invented by humans to feed and protect themselves depend on a relentless commitment to hard-nosed empiricism: you cannot assume that your arrowheads will pierce the hide of a bison or that your raft will float just because the omens are propitious and you have been given supernatural reassurance that they will. You have to be sure.

What one knows best is ... what one has learned not from books but as a result of books, through the reflections to which they have given rise.

No evidence or proof of the existence of a God has been found in the phenomena of nature, based on experience.

We must have the real thing before we can have a science of a thing.

Though we may be learned by another's knowledge, we can never be wise but by our own experience.

Experiment is the sole source of truth.

There's no point of having faith if you have evidence.