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The man who wants his wedding garments to suit him must allow plenty of time for the measure.
Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton -
Earnestness is the best gift of mental power, and deficiency of heart is the cause of many men never becoming great.
Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton
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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.
Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton -
Of all the weaknesses little men rail against, there is none that they are more apt to ridicule than the tendency to believe. And of all the signs of a corrupt heart and a feeble head, the tendency of incredulity is the surest. Real philosophy seeks rather to solve than to deny.
Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton -
Art itself is essentially ethical; because every true work of art must have a beauty or grandeur of some kind, and beauty and grandeur cannot be comprehended by the beholder except through the moral sentiment. The eye is only a witness; it is not a judge. The mind judges what the eye reports to it; therefore, whatever elevates the moral sentiment to the contemplation of beauty and grandeur is in itself ethical.
Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton -
Self-confidence is not hope; it is the self-judgment of your own internal forces in their relation to the world without, which results from the failure of many hopes and the non-realization of many fears.
Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton -
I was always an early riser. Happy the man who is! Every morning day comes to him with a virgin's love, full of bloom and freshness. The youth of nature is contagious, like the gladness of a happy child.
Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton -
Life, that ever needs forgiveness, has, for its first duty, to forgive.
Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton
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To find what you seek in the road of life, the best proverb of all is that which says: Leave no stone unturned.
Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton -
Happy indeed the poet of whom, like Orpheus, nothing is known but an immortal name! Happy next, perhaps, the poet of whom, like Homer, nothing is known but the immortal works. The more the merely human part of the poet remains a mystery, the more willing is the reverence given to his divine mission.
Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton -
Agreeable surprises are the perquisites of youth.
Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton -
Let us fill urns with rose-leaves in May And hive the the trifty sweetness for December!
Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton -
What, after all, is heaven, but a transition from dim guesses and blind struggling with a mysterious and adverse fate to the fullness of all wisdom--from ignorance, in a word, to knowledge, but knowledge of what order?
Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton -
Poets alone are sure of immortality; they are the truest diviners of nature.
Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton
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In solitude the passions feed upon the heart.
Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton -
Toil to some is happiness, and rest to others. This man can only breathe in crowds, and that man only in solitudes.
Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton -
Whatever you lend let it be your money, and not your name. Money you may get again, and, if not, you may contrive to do without it; name once lost you cannot get again.
Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton -
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.
Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton -
Not in the knowledge of things without, but in the perfection of the soul within, lies the empire of man aspiring to be more than man.
Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton -
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.
Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton
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When some one sorrow, that is yet reparable, gets hold of your mind like a monomania,--when you think, because Heaven has denied you this or that, on which you had set your heart, that all your life must be a blank,--oh, then diet yourself well on biography,--the biography of good and great men. See how little a space one sorrow really makes in life. See scarce a page, perhaps, given to some grief similar to your own, and how triumphantly the life sails on beyond it.
Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton -
A man of genius is inexhaustible only in proportion as he is always renourishing his genius.
Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton -
Society is a long series of uprising ridges, which from the first to the last offer no valley of repose. Whenever you take your stand, you are looked down upon by those above you, and reviled and pelted by those below you. Every creature you see is a farthing Sisyphus, pushing his little stone up some Liliputian mole-hill. This is our world.
Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton -
Genius, the Pythian of the beautiful, leaves its large truths a riddle to the dull.
Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton