Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton Quotes
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The higher the rank the less pretence, because there is less to pretend to.
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Vanity calculates but poorly on the vanity of others; what a virtue we should distil from frailty, what a world of pain we should save our brethren, if we would suffer our own weakness to be the measure of theirs.
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Our very wretchedness grows dear to us when suffering for one we love.
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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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Whenever man commits a crime heaven finds a witness.
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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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Dandies, when first-rate, are generally very agreeable men.
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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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He who seeks repentance for the past, should woo the angel virtue for the future.
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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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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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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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Our ideas, like orange-plants, spread out in proportion to the size of the box which imprisons the roots.
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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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It is an error to suppose that courage means courage in everything.
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Childhood and genius have the same master organ in common - inquisitiveness.
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In solitude the passions feed upon the heart.
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Poets alone are sure of immortality; they are the truest diviners of nature.
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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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I would rather have five energetic and competent enemies than one fool friend.
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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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Let us fill urns with rose-leaves in May And hive the the trifty sweetness for December!
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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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Ambition has no rest.