Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton Quotes
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Man must be disappointed with the lesser things of life before he can comprehend the full value of the greater.
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Talk not of genius baffled. Genius is master of man. Genius does what it must, and Talent does what it can.
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I have wrought great use out of evil tools.
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We cannot of ourselves estimate the degree of our success in what we strive for.
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Master books, but do not let them master you.
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Evening is the delight of virtuous age; it seems an emblem of the tranquil close of busy life--serene, placid, and mild, with the impress of its great Creator stamped upon it; it spreads its quiet wings over the grave, and seems to promise that all shall be peace beyond it.
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As a general rule, people who flagrantly pretend to anything are the reverse of that which they pretend to. A man who sets up for a saint is sure to be a sinner; and a man who boasts that he is a sinner is sure to have some feeble, maudlin, snivelling bit of saintship about him which is enough to make him a humbug.
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Expression is the mystery of beauty.
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In early youth, if we find it difficult to control our feelings, so we find it difficult to vent them in the presence of others. On the spring side of twenty, if anything affects us, we rush to lock ourselves up in our room, or get away into the street or the fields; in our earlier years we are still the savages of nature, and we do as the poor brutes do. The wounded stag leaves the herd; and if there is anything on a dog's faithful heart, he slinks away into a corner.
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There is an ill-breeding to which, whatever our rank and nature, we are almost equally sensitive, the ill-breeding that comes from want of consideration for others.
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He who writes prose builds his temple to Fame in rubble; he who writes verses builds it in granite.
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The Management of money is, in much, the management of self. If heaven allotted to each man seven guardian angels, five of them, at least, would be found night and day hovering over his pockets.
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It is difficult to say who do you the most mischief, enemies with the worst intentions, or friends with the best.
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The classic literature is always modern.
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When the soul communes with itself the lip is silent.
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Remedy your deficiencies, and your merits will take care of themselves. Every man has in him good and evil. His good is his valiant army, his evil is his corrupt commissariat; reform the commissariat and the army will do its duty.
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Books are but waste paper unless we spend in action the wisdom we get from thought.
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What, after all, is heaven, but a transition from dim guesses and blind struggling with a mysterious and adverse fate to the fullness of all wisdom--from ignorance, in a word, to knowledge, but knowledge of what order?
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Reading without purpose is sauntering not exercise.
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The real truthfulness of all works of imagination, sculpture, painting, and written fiction, is so purely in the imagination, that the artist never seeks to represent positive truth, but the idealized image of a truth.
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It is an error to suppose that courage means courage in everything. Most people are brave only in the dangers to which they accustom themselves, either in imagination or practice.
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As it has been finely expressed, "Principle is a passion for truth." And as an earlier and homelier writer hath it, "The truths we believe in are the pillars of our world.
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Time, O my friend, is money! Time wasted can never conduce to money well managed.
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The secret of fashion is to surprise and never to disappoint.