Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton Quotes
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It is a wonderful advantage to a man, in every pursuite or avocation, to secure an adviser in a sensible woman. In woman there is at once a subtle delicacy of tact, and a plain soundness of judgement, which are rarely combined to an equal degree in man. A woman, if she be really your friend, will have a sensitive regard for your character, honor, repute. She will seldom counsel you to do a shabby thing: for a woman friend always desires to be proud of you.
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Good humor is the sunshine of the mind.
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The fewer blows, the better. Brave men fight if they must; wise men never fight if they can help it.
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The man who succeeds above his fellows is the one who early in life, clearly discerns his object, and towards that object habitually directs his powers. Even genius itself is but fine observation strengthened by fixity of purpose. Every man who observes vigilantly and resolves steadfastly grows unconsciously into genius.
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Art employs method for the symmetrical formation of beauty, as science employs it for the logical exposition of truth; but the mechanical process is, in the last, ever kept visibly distinct, while in the first it escapes from sight amid the shows of color and the curves of grace.
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There is no man so friendless but that he can find a friend sincere enough to tell him disagreeable truths.
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We may observe in humorous authors that the faults they chiefly ridicule have often a likeness in themselves. Cervantes had much of the knight-errant in him; Sir George Etherege was unconsciously the Fopling Flutter of his own satire; Goldsmith was the same hero to chambermaids, and coward to ladies that he has immortalized in his charming comedy; and the antiquarian frivolities of Jonathan Oldbuck had their resemblance in Jonathan Oldbuck's creator.
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There are two avenues from the little passions and the drear calamities of earth; both lead to the heaven and away from hell-Art and Science. But art is more godlike than science; science discovers, art creates.
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They have written volumes out of which a couplet of verse, a period in prose, may cling to the rock of ages, as a shell that survives a deluge.
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One vice worn out makes us wiser than fifty tutors.
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The heart of a girl is like a convent--the holier the cloister, the more charitable the door.
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Punctuality is the stern virtue of men of business, and the graceful courtesy of princes.
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Nothing can constitute good-breeding that has not good-nature for its foundation.
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Say what we will, we may be sure that ambition is an error. Its wear and tear on the heart are never recompensed.
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Though no participator in the joy of more vehement sport, I have a pleasure that I cannot reconcile to my abstract notions of the tenderness due to dumb creatures in the tranquil cruelty of angling. I can only palliate the wanton destructiveness of my amusement by trying to assure myself that my pleasure does not spring from the success of the treachery I practise toward a poor little fish, but rather from that innocent revelry in the luxuriance of summer life which only anglers enjoy to the utmost.
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The object of ambition, unlike that of love, never being wholly possessed, ambition is the more durable passion of the two.
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In families well ordered, there is always one firm, sweet temper, which controls without seeming to dictate. The Greeks represented Persuasion as crowned.
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Keep unscathed the good name; keep out of peril the honor without which even your battered old soldier who is hobbling into his grave on half-pay and a wooden leg would not change with Achilles.
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It may, indeed, be said that sympathy exists in all minds, as Faraday has discovered that magnetism exists in all metals; but a certain temperature is required to develop the hidden property, whether in the metal or the mind.
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At court one becomes a sort of human ant eater, and learns to catch one's prey by one's tongue.
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The first essential to success in the art you practice is respect for the art itself.
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I did not fall into love - I rose into love.
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When a man is not amused, he feels an involuntary contempt for those who are.
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Writers are the main landmarks of the past.