Greville Quotes & Sayings

We are not slow at discovering the selfishness of others; for this plain reason
because it clashes with our own. — Fulke Greville, 1st Baron Brooke

A proud man never shows his pride so much as when he is civil. — Sir Fulke Greville

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

I thought about the times we'd had in his small garret above Greville's darkroom. And I didn't feel anything. It's strange how strong emotions can be so easily diminished as your life continues; how deepest intimacies become commonplace half-recalled memories-- such as an exotic holiday you once went on, or a cocktail party where you drank far too much, or winning a race at the school sports day. Nothing stirs anymore. — William Boyd

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. — Fulke Greville, 1st Baron Brooke

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

A generous man places the benefits he confers beneath his feet; those he receives, nearest his heart. — Greville Janner, Baron Janner Of Braunstone

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

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

The greatest slave in a kingdom is generally the king of it. — Fulke Greville, 1st Baron Brooke

He whom God chooseth, out of doubt doth well:
What they that choose their God do, who can tell? — Sir Fulke Greville

Habit is the cement of society, the comfort of life, and, alas! The root of error. — Fulke Greville, 1st Baron Brooke

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

True joy is only hope put out of fear. — Sir Fulke Greville

Out of mind as soon as out of sight. — Sir Fulke Greville

Those men who are commended by everybody must be very extraordinary men; or, which is more probable, very inconsiderable men. — Sir Fulke Greville

Love will sacrifice more to others than friendship, but then it exacts more from them. — Fulke Greville, 1st Baron Brooke

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

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

Good-humor is allied to generosity, ill-humor to meanness. — Sir Fulke Greville

dropsy. He had been subject to spasms, and in consequence of — Charles Greville

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

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

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

It would be doing cunning too much honor to call it an inferior species of true discernment. — Fulke Greville, 1st Baron Brooke

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

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

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

The mind of man is this world's true dimension; and knowledge is the measure of the mind. — Sir Fulke Greville

When real nobleness accompanies that imaginary one of birth, the imaginary seems to mix with real, and becomes real too. — Fulke Greville, 1st Baron Brooke

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

To divest one's self of some prejudices would be like taking off the skin to feel the better. — Sir Fulke Greville

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

Might not most men be as well named boys grown old. — Fulke Greville, 1st Baron Brooke

As charity covers a multitude of sins before God, so does politeness before men. — Sir Fulke Greville

Most men have more courage than even they themselves think they have ... — Greville Janner, Baron Janner Of Braunstone

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

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

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

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

Unbecoming forwardness oftener proceeds from ignorance than impudence. — Sir Fulke Greville

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

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

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. — Fulke Greville, 1st Baron Brooke

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

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

It is in numberless instances happier to have a false opinion which we believe true, than a true one of which we doubt. — Fulke Greville, 1st Baron Brooke

Genius always looks forward, and not only sees what is, but what necessarily will be. — Fulke Greville, 1st Baron Brooke

If nature did not take delight in blood, She would have made more easy ways to good. — Fulke Greville, 1st Baron Brooke

I have often thought that the nature of women was interior to that of men in general, but superior in particular. — Sir Fulke Greville

There sometimes wants only a stroke of fortune to discover numberless latent good or bad qualities, which would otherwise have been eternally concealed. — Greville Janner, Baron Janner Of Braunstone

How happy is it for us, that the admiration of others should depend so much more on their ignorance than our perfection! — Fulke Greville, 1st Baron Brooke

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

Surely no man can reflect, without wonder upon the vicissitudes of human life arising from causes in the highest degree accidental and trifling. If you trace the necessary concatenation of human events a very little way back, you may perhaps discover that a person's very going in or out of a door has been the means of coloring with misery or happiness the remaining current of his life. — Sir Fulke Greville

Despair gives the shocking ease to the mind that a mortification gives to the body. — Sir Fulke Greville

The world is an excellent judge in general, but a very bad one in particular. — Sir Fulke Greville

Penetration seems a kind of inspiration; it gives me an idea of prophecy. — Fulke Greville, 1st Baron Brooke

Envy is but the smoke of low estate,
Ascending still against the fortunate. — Sir Fulke Greville

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

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

We are oftener deceived by being told some truth than no truth. — Fulke Greville, 1st Baron Brooke

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

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. — Fulke Greville, 1st Baron Brooke

Human knowledge is the parent of doubt. — Sir Fulke Greville

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

You may fail to shine in the opinion of others, both in our conversation and actions, from being superior, as well as inferior to them. — Greville Janner, Baron Janner Of Braunstone

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

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

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

Our companions please us less from the charms we find in their conversation than from those they find in ours. — Sir Fulke Greville

Respect is better procured by exacting than soliciting it. — Sir Fulke Greville

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

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

Man is the only creature endowed with the power of laughter. — Sir Fulke Greville

Avarice starves its possessor to fatten those who come after, and who are eagerly awaiting the demise of the accumulator. — Sir Fulke Greville

The bad scorn the good . . .
and the crooked despise the straight."
~Greville — Dick Francis

Some women destroy all your sensibility towards them by their coldness, others by their heat. — Fulke Greville, 1st Baron Brooke

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

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. — Fulke Greville, 1st Baron Brooke

Pleasure is the business of the young, business the pleasure of the old. — Fulke Greville, 1st Baron Brooke

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

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

Wit catches of wit, as fire of fire. — Fulke Greville, 1st Baron Brooke

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

Many with trust, with doubt few, are undone. — Sir Fulke Greville

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

Fire and people do in this agree,They both good servants, both ill masters be. — Fulke Greville, 1st Baron Brooke

Politics is the food of sense exposed to the hunger of folly. — Fulke Greville, 1st Baron Brooke

No man ever reaches manhood till a woman's tenderness Is a part of his possession. — Fulke Greville, 1st Baron Brooke

The brains of a pedant however full, are vacant. — Sir Fulke Greville

Even the most humane and compassionate of the monotheisms and polytheisms are complicit in this quiet and irrational authoritarianism: they proclaim us, in Fulke Greville's unforgettable line, "Created sick Commanded to be well." And there are totalitarian insinuations to back this up if its appeal should fail. — Christopher Hitchens

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

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

I hardly know so true a mark of a little mind as the servile imitation of others. — Sir Fulke Greville