Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton Quotes
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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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What a mistake to suppose that the passions are strongest in youth! The passions are not stronger, but the control over them is weaker! They are more easily excited, they are more violent and apparent; but they have less energy, less durability, less intense and concentrated power than in maturer life.
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Beautiful eyes in the face of a handsome woman are like eloquence to speech.
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A good cigar is as great a comfort to a man as a good cry to a woman.
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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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Bright and illustrious illusions!
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Out of the ashes of misanthropy benevolence rises again; we find many virtues where we had imagined all was vice, many acts of disinterested friendship where we had fancied all was calculation and fraud--and so gradually from the two extremes we pass to the proper medium; and, feeling that no human being is wholly good or wholly base, we learn that true knowledge of mankind which induces us to expect little and forgive much. The world cures alike the optimist and the misanthrope.
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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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Man must be disappointed with the lesser things of life before he can comprehend the full value of the greater.
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Good humor is the sunshine of the mind.
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Revolutions are not made with rosewater.
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Alone!-that worn-out word, So idly spoken, and so coldly heard; Yet all that poets sing and grief hath known Of hopes laid waste, knells in that word ALONE!
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Shame is like the weaver's thread; if it breaks in the net, it is wholly imperfect.
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What is human is immortal!
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The night is past,-joy cometh with the morrow.
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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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A man is arrogant in proportion to his ignorance. Man's natural tendency is to egotism. Man, in his infancy of knowledge, thinks that all creation was formed for him.
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That man will never be a perfect gentleman who lives only with gentlemen. To be a man of the world we must view that world in every grade and in every perspective.
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Nothing ages like laziness.
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Master books, but do not let them master you.
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We cannot of ourselves estimate the degree of our success in what we strive for.
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Fine natures are like fine poems; a glance at the first two lines suffices for a guess into the beauty that waits you if you read on.
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A man is already of consequence in the world when it is known that we can implicitly rely upon him. Often I have known a man to be preferred in stations of honor and profit because he had this reputation: When he said he knew a thing, he knew it, and when he said he would do a thing, he did it.
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Fortune is said to be blind, but her favorites never are. Ambition has the eye of the eagle, prudence that of the lynx; the first looks through the air, the last along the ground.