Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton Quotes
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The faults of a brilliant writer are never dangerous on the long run; a thousand people read his work who would read no other; inquiry is directed to each of his doctrines; it is soon discovered what is sound and what is false; the sound become maxims, and the false beacons.
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Tell me, sweet eyes, from what divinest star did ye drink in your liquid melancholy?
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As the excitement of the game increases, prudence is sure to diminish.
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To live On means not yours--be brave in silks and laces, Gallant in steeds; splendid in banquets; all Not yours. Given, uninherited, unpaid for; This is to be a trickster; and to filch Men's art and labour, which to them is wealth, Life, daily bread;--quitting all scores with "friend, You're troublesome!" Why this, forgive me, Is what, when done with a less dainty grace, Plain folks call "Theft.
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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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Genius, the Pythian of the beautiful, leaves its large truths a riddle to the dull.
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Expression is the mystery of beauty.
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Nothing so good as a university education, nor worse than a university without its education.
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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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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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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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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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The secret of fashion is to surprise and never to disappoint.
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In some exquisite critical hints on "Eurythmy," Goethe remarks, "that the best composition in pictures is that which, observing the most delicate laws of harmony, so arranges the objects that they by their position tell their own story." And the rule thus applied to composition in painting applies no less to composition in literature.
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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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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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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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Books are but waste paper unless we spend in action the wisdom we get from thought.
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He who esteems trifles for themselves is a trifler; he who esteems them for the conclusions to be drawn from them, or the advantage to which they can be put, is a philosopher.
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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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But never yet the dog our country fed, Betrayed the kindness or forgot the bread.
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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.