FULKE GREVILLE

Oh wearisome condition of humanity—born under one law, to another bound.

… knowing as the man in the street always does

Religious feuds are rife…. Everybody goes on just the same, and nobody cares except those who can’t get bread to eat.

… 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.

Politics is the food of sense exposed to the hunger of folly.

Wit catches of wit, as fire of fire.

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.

When real nobleness accompanies that imaginary one of birth, the imaginary seems to mix with real, and becomes real too.

We are not slow at discovering the selfishness of others; for this plain reason--because it clashes with our own.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Love will sacrifice more to others than friendship, but then it exacts more from them.

The greatest slave in a kingdom is generally the king of it.

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

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.

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.

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!

How happy is it for us, that the admiration of others should depend so much more on their ignorance than our perfection!

It would be doing cunning too much honor to call it an inferior species of true discernment.

If nature did not take delight in blood, She would have made more easy ways to good.

Fire and people do in this agree,They both good servants, both ill masters be.