Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton Quotes
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Philosophers have done wisely when they have told us to cultivate our reason rather than our feelings, for reason reconciles us to the daily things of existence; our feelings teach us to yearn after the far, the difficult, the unseen.
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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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The Italians have voices like peacocks - German gives me a cold in the head - and Russian is nothing but sneezing.
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It is an error to suppose that courage means courage in everything.
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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 mate for beauty should be a man and not a money chest.
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Love is a very contradiction of all the elements of our ordinary nature -- it makes the proud man meek -- the cheerful, sad -- the high-spirited, tame; our strongest resolutions, our hardiest energy fail before it. Believe me, you cannot prophesy of its future effect in a man from any knowledge of his past character.
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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.
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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.
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A prudent consideration for Number One.
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Fate! There is no fate. Between the thought and the success God is the only agent. Fate is not the ruler, but the servant of Providence.
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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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When a man is not amused, he feels an involuntary contempt for those who are.
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It is a glorious fever, desire to know.
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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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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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Each man forms his duty according to his predominant characteristic; the stern require an avenging judge; the gentle, a forgiving father. Just so the pygmies declared that Jove himself was a pygmy.
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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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Writers are the main landmarks of the past.
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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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There is no past, as long as books shall live. Books make the past our heritage and our home.
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Our ideas, like orange-plants, spread out in proportion to the size of the box which imprisons the roots.
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Every man loves and admires his own country because it produced him.
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A mind once cultivated will not lie fallow for half an hour.