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?
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.
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.
Pleasure is the business of the young, business the pleasure of the old.
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.
Genius always looks forward, and not only sees what is, but what necessarily will be.
Fire and people do in this agree,They both good servants, both ill masters be.
How happy is it for us, that the admiration of others should depend so much more on their ignorance than our perfection!
Love will sacrifice more to others than friendship, but then it exacts more from them.
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.
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.
No man ever reaches manhood till a woman's tenderness Is a part of his possession.
If nature did not take delight in blood, She would have made more easy ways to good.
It would be doing cunning too much honor to call it an inferior species of true discernment.
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.
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 in numberless instances happier to have a false opinion which we believe true, than a true one of which we doubt.
Some women destroy all your sensibility towards them by their coldness, others by their heat.
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.
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.
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.
