Sir Fulke Greville Quotes
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.
Despair gives the shocking ease to the mind that a mortification gives to the body.
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?
To divest one's self of some prejudices would be like taking off the skin to feel the better.
Avarice starves its possessor to fatten those who come after, and who are eagerly awaiting the demise of the accumulator.
Our companions please us less from the charms we find in their conversation than from those they find in ours.
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.
We should do by our cunning as we do by our courage--always have it ready to defend ourselves, never to offend others.
He whom God chooseth, out of doubt doth well: What they that choose their God do, who can tell?
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.
I hardly know so true a mark of a little mind as the servile imitation of others.
Whatever natural right men may have to freedom and independency, it is manifest that some men have a natural ascendency over others.
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.
Removing prejudices is, alas! too often removing the boundary of a delightful near prospect in order to let in a shockingly extensive one.
Those men who are commended by everybody must be very extraordinary men; or, which is more probable, very inconsiderable men.
A lively and agreeable man has not only the merit of liveliness and agreeableness himself, but that also of awakening them in others.
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.
I have often thought that the nature of women was interior to that of men in general, but superior in particular.
True delicacy, as true generosity, is more wounded by an offence from itself--if I may be allowed the expression--than to itself.
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.
Some characters are like some bodies in chemistry; very good, perhaps, in themselves, yet fly off and refuse the least conjunction with each other.
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?
The mind of man is this world's true dimension; and knowledge is the measure of the mind.
