Daily Inspiration Quote by Francis Bacon

Bacon is puncturing a very human accounting trick: we keep the receipts for our lucky breaks and misplace the invoices for our failures. In one clean strike, he explains why superstitions feel empirically true even when they are statistically hollow. “Hits” are memorable, narratable, and socially shareable; “misses” dissolve into background noise. The mind doesn’t just make patterns, it curates them.

The line’s force comes from its proto-scientific posture. Bacon isn’t mocking credulity as mere stupidity; he’s diagnosing a mechanism. Superstition isn’t an exotic glitch in some backward brain. It’s the default setting of observation without method. The subtext is ruthless: if you don’t discipline attention, you will manufacture evidence for whatever you want to believe. That includes omens, prophecies, lucky charms, even the “I knew it” satisfaction of hindsight.

Context matters. Writing at the dawn of the scientific revolution, Bacon is arguing for a new way of knowing: systematic experiment, careful record-keeping, and skepticism toward anecdote. His complaint anticipates what we now call confirmation bias and survivorship bias, centuries before psychology put names on them. It’s also a political jab at an era thick with astrology, religious portents, and courtly rumor, where a single coincidence could harden into policy or panic.

Bacon’s intent is reformist: not to sneer at believers, but to re-engineer belief itself, shifting authority from memorable stories to reproducible results.