Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton Quotes
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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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If a good face is a letter of recommendation, a good heart is a letter of credit.
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Julius Caesar owed two millions when he risked the experiment of being general in Gaul. If Julius Caesar had not lived to cross the Rubicon, and pay off his debts, what would his creditors have called Julius Caesar?
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The vices and the virtues are written in a language the world cannot construe; it reads them in a vile translation, and the translators are Failure and Success.
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Fiction may be said to be the caricature of history.
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There is but one philosophy and its name is fortitude! To bear is to conquer our fate.
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Emulation, even in brutes, is sensitively "nervous." See the tremor of the thoroughbred racer before he starts. The dray-horse does not tremble, but he does not emulate. It is not his work to run a race. Says Marcus Antoninus, "It is all one to a stone whether it be thrown upward or downward." Yet the emulation of a man of genius is seldom with his contemporaries, that is, inwardly in his mind, although outwardly in his act it would seem so. The competitors with whom his secret ambition seems to vie are the dead.
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He who doth not smoke hath either known no great griefs, or refuseth himself the softest consolation, next to that which comes from heaven.
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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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Men of strong affections are jealous of their own genius. They fear lest they should be loved for a quality, and not for themselves.
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The imagination acquires by custom a certain involuntary, unconscious power of observation and comparison, correcting its own mistakes, and arriving at precision of judgment, just as the outward eye is disciplined to compare, adjust, estimate, measure, the objects reflected on the back of its retina.
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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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Men who make money rarely saunter; men who save money rarely swagger.
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All doubt is cowardice - all trust is brave.
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The mate for beauty should be a man and not a money chest.
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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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Nothing can constitute good-breeding that has not good-nature for its foundation.
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Our glories float between the earth and heaven Like clouds which seem pavilions of the sun, And are the playthings of the casual wind.
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Beside one deed of guilt, how blest is guiltless woe!
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To dispense with ceremony is the most delicate mode of conferring a compliment.
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The higher the rank the less pretence, because there is less to pretend to.
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A man's own conscience is his sole tribunal, and he should care no more for that phantom "opinion" than he should fear meeting a ghost if he crossed the churchyard at dark.
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Art is the effort of man to express the ideas which nature suggests to him of a power above nature, whether that power be within the recesses of his own being, or in the Great First Cause of which nature, like himself, is but the effect.
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The desire of excellence is the necessary attribute of those who excel. We work little for a thing unless we wish for it. But we cannot of ourselves estimate the degree of our success in what we strive for; that task is left to others. With the desire for excellence comes, therefore, the desire for approbation. And this distinguishes intellectual excellence from moral excellence; for the latter has no necessity of human tribunal; it is more inclined to shrink from the public than to invite the public to be its judge.