Top 88 Greville Quotes
#1. What an argument in favor of social connections is the observation that by communicating our grief we have less, and by communicating our pleasure we have more.
Sir Fulke Greville
#2. I hardly know so true a mark of a little mind as the servile imitation of others.
Sir Fulke Greville
#3. 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.
Fulke Greville, 1st Baron Brooke
#4. We should do by our cunning as we do by our courage
always have it ready to defend ourselves, never to offend others.
Sir Fulke Greville
#5. 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.
Fulke Greville, 1st Baron Brooke
#6. 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?
Fulke Greville, 1st Baron Brooke
#7. 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.
Fulke Greville, 1st Baron Brooke
#8. 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
#9. dropsy. He had been subject to spasms, and in consequence of
Charles Greville
#11. Men often prove the violence of their own prejudices, even by the violence with which they attack the prejudices of other people.
Fulke Greville, 1st Baron Brooke
#12. 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.
Fulke Greville, 1st Baron Brooke
#14. Discernment is a power of the understanding in which few excel. Is not that owing to its connection with impartiality and truth? for are not prejudice and partiality blind?
Sir Fulke Greville
#15. True delicacy, as true generosity, is more wounded by an offence from itself
if I may be allowed the expression
than to itself.
Sir Fulke Greville
#18. I hardly know so melancholy a reflection as that parents are necessarily the sole directors of the management of children, whether they have or have not judgment, penetration or taste to perform the task.
Sir Fulke Greville
#19. I hardly know a sight that raises one's indignation more than that of an enlarged soul joined to a contracted fortune; unless it be that so much more common one, of a contracted soul joined to an enlarged fortune.
Sir Fulke Greville
#20. As charity covers a multitude of sins before God, so does politeness before men.
Sir Fulke Greville
#21. 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!
Fulke Greville, 1st Baron Brooke
#23. There is an unfortunate disposition in a man to attend much more to the faults of his companions which offend him, than to their perfections which please him.
Sir Fulke Greville
#24. No man was ever so much deceived by another as by himself.
Fulke Greville
#25. 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.
Fulke Greville, 1st Baron Brooke
#27. Men and statues that are admired ire an elevated situation have a very different effect upon us when we approach them; the first appear less than we imagined them, the last bigger.
Sir Fulke Greville
#29. Weak men often from the very principle of their weakness derive a certain susceptibility; delicacy and taste which render them, in those particulars, much superior to men of stronger and more consistent minds, who laugh at them.
Sir Fulke Greville
#30. 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.
Fulke Greville, 1st Baron Brooke
#31. Removing prejudices is, alas! too often removing the boundary of a delightful near prospect in order to let in a shockingly extensive one.
Sir Fulke Greville
#33. Gascoigne, Ben Jonson, Greville, Raleigh, Donne,
Poets who wrote great poems, one by one,
And spaced by many years, each line an act
Through which few labor, which no men retract.
This passion is the scholar's heritage
Yvor Winters
#35. Vanity is the poison of agreeableness; yet as poison, when artfully and properly applied, has a salutary effect in medicine, so has vanity in the commerce and society of the world.
Sir Fulke Greville
#36. 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.
Fulke Greville, 1st Baron Brooke
#41. 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.
Fulke Greville, 1st Baron Brooke
#42. The bad scorn the good . . .
and the crooked despise the straight."
~Greville
Dick Francis
#43. It is not enough that you can form nay, and follow, the most excellent rules for conducting yourself in the world. You must also know when to deviate from them, and where lies the exception.
Sir Fulke Greville
#48. I have often thought that the nature of women was interior to that of men in general, but superior in particular.
Sir Fulke Greville
#49. Despair gives the shocking ease to the mind that a mortification gives to the body.
Sir Fulke Greville
#53. Some characters are like some bodies in chemistry; very good, perhaps, in themselves, yet fly off and refuse the least conjunction with each other.
Sir Fulke Greville
#54. You that seek what life is in death,
Now find it air that once was breath.
New names unknown, old names gone:
Till time end bodies, but souls none.
Reader! then make time, while you be,
But steps to your eternity.
Fulke Greville Baron Brooke
#55. Avarice starves its possessor to fatten those who come after, and who are eagerly awaiting the demise of the accumulator.
Sir Fulke Greville
#59. 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.
Fulke Greville, 1st Baron Brooke
#60. Whatever natural right men may have to freedom and independency, it is manifest that some men have a natural ascendency over others.
Sir Fulke Greville
#61. The mind of man is this world's true dimension; and knowledge is the measure of the mind.
Sir Fulke Greville
#62. Envy is but the smoke of low estate,
Ascending still against the fortunate.
Sir Fulke Greville
#65. Oh, wearisome condition of humanity,
Born under one law, to another bound;
Vainly begot, and yet forbidden vanity,
Created sick, commanded to be sound.
Fulke Greville
#67. A lively and agreeable man has not only the merit of liveliness and agreeableness himself, but that also of awakening them in others.
Sir Fulke Greville
#69. To divest one's self of some prejudices would be like taking off the skin to feel the better.
Sir Fulke Greville
#72. 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.
Fulke Greville, 1st Baron Brooke
#73. 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.
Fulke Greville, 1st Baron Brooke
#76. Unbecoming forwardness oftener proceeds from ignorance than impudence.
Sir Fulke Greville
#78. To hear Alice Keppel talk about her escape from France, one would think she had swum the Channel, with her maid between her teeth.
Ronald Greville
#79. A very small offence may be a just cause for great resentment: it is often much less the particular instance which is obnoxious to us than the proof it carries with it of the general tenor and disposition of the mind from whence it sprung.
Sir Fulke Greville
#80. There is in some men a dispassionate neutrality of mind, which, though it generally passes for good temper, can neither gratify nor warm us: it must indeed be granted that these men can only negatively offend: but then it should also be remembered that they cannot positively please.
Sir Fulke Greville
#81. 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.
Fulke Greville, 1st Baron Brooke
#82. Those men who are commended by everybody must be very extraordinary men; or, which is more probable, very inconsiderable men.
Sir Fulke Greville
#83. The world is an excellent judge in general, but a very bad one in particular.
Sir Fulke Greville
#84. Good-humor will sometimes conquer ill-humor, but ill-humor will conquer it oftener; and for this plain reason, good-humor must operate on generosity, ill-humor on meanness.
Sir Fulke Greville
#86. Our companions please us less from the charms we find in their conversation than from those they find in ours.
Sir Fulke Greville
#87. He whom God chooseth, out of doubt doth well:
What they that choose their God do, who can tell?
Sir Fulke Greville
#88. We laugh heartily to see a whole flock of sheep jump because one did so. Might not one imagine that superior beings do the same, and for exactly the same reason?
Sir Fulke Greville