Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton Quotes
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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 first essential to success in the art you practice is respect for the art itself.
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Fate whirls on the bark, and the rough gale sweeps from the rising tide the lazy calm of thought.
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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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Hobbies should be wives, not mistresses. It will not do to have more than one at a time. One hobby leads you out of extravagance; a team of hobbies you cannot drive till you are rich enough to find corn for them all. Few men are rich enough for that.
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He that fancies himself very enlightened, because he sees the deficiencies of others, may be very ignorant, because he has not studied his own.
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Of all the conditions to which the heart is subject suspense is one that most gnaws and cankers into the frame. One little month of that suspense, when it involves death, we are told by an eye witness in "Wakefield on the Punishment of Death," is sufficient to plough fixed lines and furrows in a convict of five and twenty,--sufficient, to dash the brown hair with grey, and to bleach the grey to white.
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We love the beautiful and serene, but we have a feeling as deep as love for the terrible and dark.
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There is no policy like politeness; and a good manner is the best thing in the world either to get a good name, or to supply the want of it.
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One vice worn out makes us wiser than fifty tutors.
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Certain I am that every author who has written a book with earnest forethought and fondly cherished designs will bear testimony to the fact that much which he meant to convey has never been guessed at in any review of his work; and many a delicate beauty of thought, on which he principally valued himself, remains, like the statue of Isis, an image of truth from which no hand lifts the veil.
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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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Bu is a word that cools many a warm impulse, stifles many a kindly thought, puts a dead stop to many a brotherly deed. No one would ever love his neighbor as himself if he listened to all the Buts that could be said.
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It is noticeable how intuitively in age we go back with strange fondness to all that is fresh in the earliest dawn of youth. If we never cared for little children before, we delight to see them roll in the grass over which we hobble on crutches. The grandsire turns wearily from his middle-aged, careworn son, to listen with infant laugh to the prattle of an infant grandchild. It is the old who plant young trees; it is the old who are most saddened by the autumn; and feel most delight in the returning spring.
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I did not fall into love - I rose into love.
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Nothing can constitute good-breeding that has not good-nature for its foundation.
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He who seeks repentance for the past, should woo the angel virtue for the future.
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The Italians have voices like peacocks - German gives me a cold in the head - and Russian is nothing but sneezing.
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The bold sympathize with the bold; and in great hearts, there is always a certain friendship for a gallant foe.
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Fiction may be said to be the caricature of history.
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Birds sing in vain to the ear, flowers bloom in vain to the eye, of mortified vanity and galled ambition. He who would know repose in retirement must carry into retirement his destiny, integral and serene, as the Caesars transported the statue of Fortune into the chamber they chose for their sleep.
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The more I think of a people calmly developing, in regions excluded from our sight and deemed uninhabitable by our sages, powers surpassing our most disciplined modes of force, and virtues to which our life, social and political, becomes antagonistic in proportion as our civilisation advances - the more devoutly I pray that ages may yet elapse before there emerge into sunlight our inevitable destroyers.
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The mate for beauty should be a man and not a money chest.
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A man of genius is inexhaustible only in proportion as he is always renourishing his genius.