Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton Quotes
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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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The higher the rank the less pretence, because there is less to pretend to.
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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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He who seeks repentance for the past, should woo the angel virtue for the future.
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Our very wretchedness grows dear to us when suffering for one we love.
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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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What a mistake to suppose that the passions are strongest in youth! The passions are not stronger, but the control over them is weaker! They are more easily excited, they are more violent and apparent; but they have less energy, less durability, less intense and concentrated power than in maturer life.
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The worst part of an eminent man's conversation is, nine times out of ten, to be found in that part by which he means to be clever.
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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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Dandies, when first-rate, are generally very agreeable men.
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Whenever man commits a crime heaven finds a witness.
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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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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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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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To mourn deeply for the death of another loosens from myself the petty desire for, and the animal adherence to life. We have gained the end of the philosopher, and view without shrinking the coffin and the pall.
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I would rather have five energetic and competent enemies than one fool friend.
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It is an error to suppose that courage means courage in everything.
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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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Ambition has no rest.
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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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Poets alone are sure of immortality; they are the truest diviners of nature.
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Childhood and genius have the same master organ in common - inquisitiveness.
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Men who make money rarely saunter; men who save money rarely swagger.
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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.