Daily Inspiration Quote by Francis Bacon

Eloquence, Bacon needles here, is the cheap suit of rhetoric: it can look impressive while doing very little actual work. “Discretion of speech” is the harder, rarer craft - the ability to measure words against consequences, against power dynamics, against the listener’s temperament. In a courtly world where a sentence could curry favor or court disaster, verbal brilliance wasn’t just insufficient; it was potentially reckless. Bacon is writing as someone who understood that language is not merely aesthetic but operational.

The line’s quiet provocation is that “good words” and “good order” are basically internal metrics. They flatter the speaker’s sense of mastery: the perfect phrase, the tidy argument, the performance of intelligence. Bacon shifts the standard outward. “Agreeably to him with whom we deal” makes communication an act of calibration, not self-expression. It’s an early modern version of what we now call audience awareness, but with sharper stakes: persuasion, survival, and access.

The subtext is almost cynical in its practicality. Bacon isn’t romanticizing authenticity; he’s elevating tact as a form of intelligence. Discretion implies restraint, timing, and selective silence - acknowledging that speech is a social transaction, not a solo recital. The quote works because it punctures vanity. It tells the gifted talker that their gift is secondary to judgment, and it tells the ambitious listener that “effective” speech is often less about truth beautifully arranged than truth (or strategy) delivered in the one form the other person can accept.