Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton Quotes
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Bright and illustrious illusions! Who can blame, who laugh at the boy, who not admire and commend him, for that desire of a fame outlasting the Pyramids by which he insensibly learns to live in a life beyond the present, and nourish dreams of a good unattainable by the senses?
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The first essential to success in the art you practice is respect for the art itself.
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In all cases of heart-ache, the application of another man's disappointment draws out the pain and allays the irritation.
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Man hazards the condition and loses the virtues of a freeman, in proportion as he accustoms his thoughts to view without anguish or shame, his lapse into the bondage of debtor.
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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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We love the beautiful and serene, but we have a feeling as deep as love for the terrible and dark.
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He who seeks repentance for the past, should woo the angel virtue for the future.
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To how many is the death of the beloved the parent of faith!
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The most delicate beauty in the mind of women is, and ever must be, an independence of artificial stimulants for content. It is not so with men. The links that bind men to capitals belong to the golden chain of civilization,--the chain which fastens all our destinies to the throne of Jove. And hence the larger proportion of men in whom genius is pre-eminent have preferred to live in cities, though some of them have bequeathed to us the loveliest pictures of the rural scenes in which they declined to dwell.
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Fiction may be said to be the caricature of history.
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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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Toil to some is happiness, and rest to others. This man can only breathe in crowds, and that man only in solitudes.
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In life, as in whist, hope nothing from the way cards may be dealt to you. Play the cards, whatever they be, to the best of your skill.
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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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It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents - except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness.
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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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We must remember how apt man is to extremes--rushing from credulity and weakness to suspicion and distrust.
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My father died shortly after I was twenty-one; and being left well off, and having a taste for travel and adventure, I resigned, for a time, all pursuit of the almighty dollar, and became a desultory wanderer over the face of the earth.
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Bright and illustrious illusions!
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Money never can be well managed if sought solely through the greed of money for its own sake. In all meanness there is a defect of intellect as well as of heart. And even the cleverness of avarice is but the cunning of imbecility.
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Fate laughs at probabilities.
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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.
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Whenever man commits a crime heaven finds a witness.
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Our ideas, like orange-plants, spread out in proportion to the size of the box which imprisons the roots.