All depends on keeping the eye steadily fixed on the facts of nature

  All depends on keeping the eye steadily fixed on the facts of nature and so receiving their images simply as they are. 

-Plan of Great Instauration, in The Works of Francis Bacon: Translations of the Philosophical Works (1858), Vol. 4, 32.

1.  Man, being the servant and interpreter of Nature, can do and understand so much and so much only as he has observed in fact or in thought of the course of nature.  Beyond this he neither knows anything nor can do anything. 

Nature to be commanded must be obeyed; and that which in contemplation is as the cause is in operation as the rule.    

9.  The cause and root of nearly all evils in the sciences is this — that while we falsely admire and extol the powers of the human mind we neglect to seek for its true helps.

10.  The subtlety of nature is greater many times over than the subtlety of the senses and understanding; so that all those specious meditations, speculations, and glosses in which men indulge are quite from the purpose, only there is no one by to observe it. 

19.  There are and can be only two ways of searching into and discovering truth.  The one flies from the senses and particulars to the most general axioms, and from these principles, the truth of which it takes for settled and immovable, proceeds to judgment and to the discovery of middle axioms.  And this way is now in fashion.  The other derives axioms from the senses and particulars, rising by a gradual and unbroken ascent, so that it arrives at the most general axioms last of all.  This is the true way, but as yet untried.  

24.  It cannot be that axioms established by argumentation should avail for the discovery of new works, since the subtlety of nature is greater many times over than the subtlety of argument.

31.  It is idle to expect any great advancement in science from the superinducing and engrafting of new things upon old.  We must begin anew from the very foundation, unless we would revolve forever in a circle with mean and contemptible progress.

69.  But vicious demonstrations are as the strongholds and defenses of idols; and those we have in logic do little else than make the world the bond-slave of human thought, and human thought the bond-slave of words.  Demonstrations truly are in effect the philosophies themselves and the sciences.  For such as they are, well or ill established, such are the systems of philosophy and the contemplations which follow.  Now in the whole of the process which leads from the sense and objects to axioms and conclusions, the demonstrations which we use are deceptive and incompetent.  This process consists of four parts, and has as many faults. In the first place, the impressions of the sense itself are faulty; for the sense both fails us and deceives us.  But its shortcomings are to be supplied, and its deceptions to be corrected.  Secondly, notions are ill-drawn from the impressions of the senses, and are indefinite and confused, whereas they should be definite and distinctly bounded. Thirdly, the induction is amiss which infers the principles of sciences by simple enumeration, and does not, as it ought, employ exclusions and solutions (or separations) of nature.  Lastly, that method of discovery and proof according to which the most general principles are first established, and then intermediate axioms are tried and proved by them, is the parent of error and the curse of all science.  Of these things however which now I do but touch upon, I will speak more largely when, having performed these expiations and purgings of the mind, I come to set forth the true way for the interpretation of nature.

70.  But the best demonstration by far is experience, if it go not beyond the actual experiment.  For if it be transferred to other cases which are deemed similar, unless such transfer be made by a just and orderly process, it is a fallacious thing. ore easy and gentle. 

129.  Now the empire of man over things depends wholly on the arts and sciences.  For we cannot command nature except by obeying her.  -Bacon:  Novum Organum, 1

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50.  But opiates and kindred medicaments put the spirits utterly to flight by their malignant and hostile nature.  -Bacon: Novum Organum, II

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a fine doorway to Bacon is   https://todayinsci.com/B/Bacon_Francis/BaconFrancis-Nature-Quotations.htm

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Gottfried Leibnitz: