Daily Inspiration Quote by Francis Bacon

Bacon doesn’t just moralize here; he anatomizes a temptation that feels almost modern: the urge to optimize your way around the messy business of doing things cleanly. “The shortest way” is efficiency talk, the language of cutting corners, of getting from desire to result with minimal friction. Bacon’s twist is to name what we tend to euphemize. The shortcut is “commonly the foulest” not because speed is sinful, but because speed often requires you to skip the social and ethical tolls that make life livable: honesty, patience, due process, respect for other people’s limits.

The proverb-like structure (“as it is in ways”) gives the line the air of obviousness, which is part of the point. Bacon is warning that the foul shortcut doesn’t announce itself as corruption; it presents as common sense. The subtext is political and institutional as much as personal. Writing as a statesman-philosopher in a world of court patronage, intrigue, and transactional advancement, Bacon knew how power actually moves: quietly, quickly, and often through doors you shouldn’t be using. He’s describing the seductions of expedience inside systems that reward outcomes more than methods.

Then he adds the sharper, more pragmatic clause: “the fairer way is not much about.” Ethical routes aren’t flashy; they rarely feel like decisive action. They’re longer because they involve people, accountability, and the friction of rules. Bacon isn’t selling virtue as purity. He’s selling it as a sturdier path: less thrilling, less direct, but less likely to rot the result from the inside.