Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton Quotes
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Earnestness is the best gift of mental power, and deficiency of heart is the cause of many men never becoming great.
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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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There is no past, as long as books shall live. Books make the past our heritage and our home.
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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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He who writes prose builds his temple to Fame in rubble; he who writes verses builds it in granite.
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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 must remember how apt man is to extremes--rushing from credulity and weakness to suspicion and distrust.
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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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As the films of clay are removed from our eyes, Death loses the false aspect of the spectre, and we fall at last into its arms as a wearied child upon the bosom of its mother.
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When one is in a good sound rage, it is astonishing how calm one can be.
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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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I would rather have five energetic and competent enemies than one fool friend.
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Faith builds in the dungeon and lazarhouse its sublimest shrines; and up, through roofs of stone, that shut out the eye of heaven, ascends the ladder where the angels glide to and fro,--prayer.
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It is an error to suppose that courage means courage in everything.
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As the excitement of the game increases, prudence is sure to diminish.
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Some have the temperament and tastes of genius, without its creative power. They feel acutely, but express tamely.
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Revolutions are not made with rosewater.
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Revenge is a common passion; it is the sin of the uninstructed. The savage deems it noble;but the religion of Christ, which is the sublime civilizer, emphatically condemns it. Why? Because religion ever seeks to ennoble man; and nothing so debases him as revenge.
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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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There is a great deal we never think of calling religion that is still fruit unto God, and garnered by Him in the harvest. The fruits of the Spirit are love, joy, peace, long suffering, gentleness, patience, goodness. I affirm that if these fruits are found in any form, whether you show your patience as a woman nursing a fretful child, or as a man attending to the vexing detail of a business, or as a physician following the dark mazes of sickness, or as a mechanic fitting the joints and valves of a locomotive; being honest true besides, you bring forth truth unto God.
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Every man of sound brain whom you meet knows something worth knowing better than yourself. A man, on the whole, is a better preceptor than a book. But what scholar does not allow that the dullest book can suggest to him a new and a sound idea?
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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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Poets alone are sure of immortality; they are the truest diviners of nature.
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There is but one philosophy and its name is fortitude! To bear is to conquer our fate.