Fulke Greville, 1st Baron Brooke Quotes
-
Pleasure is the business of the young, business the pleasure of the old.
→ -
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.
→ -
Man is the only creature endowed with the power of laughter; is he not also the only one that deserves to be laughed at?
→ -
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.
→ -
Some women destroy all your sensibility towards them by their coldness, others by their heat.
→ -
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 greatest slave in a kingdom is generally the king of it.
→ -
No man ever reaches manhood till a woman's tenderness Is a part of his possession.
→ -
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.
→ -
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.
→ -
Fire and people do in this agree,They both good servants, both ill masters be.
→ -
It is in numberless instances happier to have a false opinion which we believe true, than a true one of which we doubt.
→ -
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.
→ -
Men often prove the violence of their own prejudices, even by the violence with which they attack the prejudices of other people.
→ -
Might not most men be as well named boys grown old.
→ -
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.
→ -
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.
→ -
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.
→ -
O wearisome condition of humanity! Born under one law, to another bound; Vainly begot and yet forbidden vanity; Created sick, commanded to be sound.
→ -
No man was ever so much deceived by another as by himself.
→ -
If nature did not take delight in blood, She would have made more easy ways to good.
→ -
Genius always looks forward, and not only sees what is, but what necessarily will be.
→ -
Love will sacrifice more to others than friendship, but then it exacts more from them.
→ -
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.
→ -
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?
→ -
Politics is the food of sense exposed to the hunger of folly.
→ -
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.
→ -
We are oftener deceived by being told some truth than no truth.
→ -
Penetration seems a kind of inspiration; it gives me an idea of prophecy.
→ -
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?
→
Fulke Greville, 1st Baron Brooke
- Born: October 3, 1554
- Died: September 30, 1628
- Occupation: 1st Baron Brooke