Fulke Greville, 1st Baron Brooke Quotes

Taste may be compared to that exquisite sense of the bee, which instantly discovers and extracts the quintessence of every flower, and disregards all the rest of it.

Man is the only creature endowed with the power of laughter; is he not also the only one that deserves to be laughed at?

Though love and hatred are as opposites as fire and water, yet do they sometimes subsist in the breast together towards the same person; nay by their very opposition and desire to destroy each other, are they strengthened and increased.

Habit is the cement of society, the comfort of life, and, alas! The root of error.

O wearisome condition of humanity! Born under one law, to another bound; Vainly begot and yet forbidden vanity; Created sick, commanded to be sound.

Man is said to be a rational creature; but should it not rather be said, that man is a creature capable of being rational, as we say a parrot is a creature capable of speech?

The mind's eye is perhaps no better fitted for the full radiance of truth, than is the body's for that of the sun.

It by no means follows, that because two men utter the same words, they have precisely the same idea which they mean to express: language is inadequate to the variety of ideas which are conceived by different minds, and which, could they be expressed, would produce a new variety of characteristic differences between man and man.

The criterion of true beauty is that it increases on examination; if false, that it lessens.

There are sometimes beauties in a character which would never have appeared but for a defect, and defects which would never have appeared but for a beauty.

Genius always looks forward, and not only sees what is, but what necessarily will be.

One great reason why men practice generosity so little in the world, is, their finding so little there: generosity is catching; and if so many men escape it, it is in a great degree from the same reason that country-men escape the smallpox, because they meet no one to give it to them.

You deny that man is really so prejudiced as I suppose him; talk to him then of some foreign country, ask him what religion he is of.

Penetration seems a kind of inspiration; it gives me an idea of prophecy.

When real nobleness accompanies that imaginary one of birth, the imaginary seems to mix with real, and becomes real too.

There is scarce any passion so heartily decried by moralists and satirists, as AMBITION; and yet, methinks, ambition is not a vice but in a vicious mind: in a virtuous mind it is a virtue, and will be found to take its color from the character in which it is mixed. Ambition is a desire of superiority; and a man may become superior, either by making others less or himself greater.

Love will sacrifice more to others than friendship, but then it exacts more from them.

How happy is it for us, that the admiration of others should depend so much more on their ignorance than our perfection!

Pleasure is the business of the young, business the pleasure of the old.

Fire and people do in this agree,They both good servants, both ill masters be.

No man was ever so much deceived by another as by himself.

How seldom is generosity perfect and pure! How often do men give because it throws a certain inferiority on those who receive, and superiority on themselves!

Men often prove the violence of their own prejudices, even by the violence with which they attack the prejudices of other people.

We are not slow at discovering the selfishness of others; for this plain reason--because it clashes with our own.

The greatest slave in a kingdom is generally the king of it.

Silence augmenteth grief, writing increaseth rage

If the human mind naturally produces noisome weeds, it also produces flowers and fruit; and ... the best method to mend the soil in general, is for each of us to cultivate his own particular spot.

Wit catches of wit, as fire of fire.

Have you never seen a strange unconnected deformed representation of a figure, which seen in another point of view, became proportioned and agreeable? It is the picture of man.

Some women destroy all your sensibility towards them by their coldness, others by their heat.

It is in numberless instances happier to have a false opinion which we believe true, than a true one of which we doubt.

If nature did not take delight in blood, She would have made more easy ways to good.

No fruit has a more precise marked period of maturity, than love; if neglected to be gathered at that time, it will certainly fall to the ground and die away.

It is so much in the nature of men to overreach and deceive one another, that their very sports and plays are founded on that principle.

It would be doing cunning too much honor to call it an inferior species of true discernment.

If they who understand the utmost refinement of any art will enjoy the perfection of it in a manner superior to other men, will they not amply pay for that advantage in feeling more than other men the imperfection of it, which in the natural course of things must so much oftener fall in their way?

It has been said that the beauties of the mind are valuable because they are more lasting than those of the body; but I do not remember to have heard it said that the beauties of the mind are valuable because they make those of the body more lasting.

Two men are equally free from the rage of ambition; are they therefore equal in merit? Perhaps not; one may be above ambition, the other below it.

Politics is the food of sense exposed to the hunger of folly.

Might not most men be as well named boys grown old.

No man ever reaches manhood till a woman's tenderness Is a part of his possession.

We are oftener deceived by being told some truth than no truth.

Though beauty is, with the most apt similitude, I had almost said with the most literal truth, called a flower that fades and dies almost in the very moment of its maturity; yet there is, methinks, a kind of beauty which lives even to old age; a beauty that is not in the features, but, if I may be allowed the expression, shines through them. As it is not merely corporeal it is not the object of mere sense, nor is it to be discovered but by persons of true taste and refined sentiment.

Every character is in some respects uniform, and in others inconsistent; and it is only by the study both of the uniformity and inconsistency, and a comparison of them with each other, that the knowledge of man is acquired.