Francis Bacon (1561 – 1626), like his almost contemporary fellow philosopher Michel de Montaigne (1533 – 1592) was very fond of quotations. Both their main works: Bacon’s “Essays” (3 different editions: 1597, 1612, 1625) & Montaigne’s “Essais” (1580) are astonishingly plagued with them, to the point that both works would literally disappear if deprived of them.
Of course, their own personal thoughts arise all the while from their previous readings, which they quote once and again, and so, in my opinion, these hundreds upon hundreds of pages of admired wisdom they accumulated and displayed could be summarized in one single paragraph from Bacon; it is –what else?– a string of quotations (very well chained, anyway):
“Salomon saith, “There is no new thing upon the earth”. So that as Plato had an imagination, that “all knowledge was but remembrance”; so Salomon giveth his sentence, that “all novelty is but oblivion”.
[Francis Bacon; Essays, 58]
(He was very right here –in fact, this very post of mine is just another tiny proof among billions that he was –and this is not as trivial as it may seem).
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INVISIBLE FORMS 