"Wise men make more opportunities than they find"
About this Quote
Bacon’s line is a neat little dethroning of luck. In an era that still loved the language of fortune and providence, he insists on something colder and more modern: opportunities are not gifts you stumble over, they’re outputs you manufacture. The “wise men” here aren’t bookish sages admiring truth from a distance; they’re operators. Bacon, after all, wasn’t just a philosopher of knowledge but an architect of method, a statesman fluent in court politics, and a writer selling a new bargain to his age: stop waiting for the world to reveal its secrets and start designing the conditions that force revelations.
The subtext is a rebuke to passive virtue. Finding implies accident, a kind of moral innocence: I was there when the door opened. Making implies agency, even manipulation: I built the door, hired the carpenter, and decided who gets a key. That faintly Machiavellian edge is part of why it works. Bacon’s wisdom isn’t purity; it’s leverage.
It also doubles as a cultural memo for early modern England, where social mobility, colonial expansion, and scientific inquiry were turning the old map into a draft. “Opportunity” becomes something like experiment: you set up a controlled environment, test, iterate, and convert failure into data. The sentence is short, confident, almost managerial - a proto-modern ethos of productivity in thirteen words. It flatters the reader with a challenge: if you’re still waiting to “find” your chance, you haven’t earned the title.
The subtext is a rebuke to passive virtue. Finding implies accident, a kind of moral innocence: I was there when the door opened. Making implies agency, even manipulation: I built the door, hired the carpenter, and decided who gets a key. That faintly Machiavellian edge is part of why it works. Bacon’s wisdom isn’t purity; it’s leverage.
It also doubles as a cultural memo for early modern England, where social mobility, colonial expansion, and scientific inquiry were turning the old map into a draft. “Opportunity” becomes something like experiment: you set up a controlled environment, test, iterate, and convert failure into data. The sentence is short, confident, almost managerial - a proto-modern ethos of productivity in thirteen words. It flatters the reader with a challenge: if you’re still waiting to “find” your chance, you haven’t earned the title.
Quote Details
| Topic | Wisdom |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
More Quotes by Francis
Add to List
