Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton Quotes
-
Grief alone can teach us what is man.
-
Imitation, if noble and general, insures the best hope of originality.
-
Strive, while improving your one talent, to enrich your whole capital as a man. It is in this way that you escape from the wretched narrow-mindedness which is the characteristic of every one who cultivates his specialty alone.
-
Reading without purpose is sauntering not exercise.
-
Some have the temperament and tastes of genius, without its creative power. They feel acutely, but express tamely.
-
The learned compute that seven hundred and seven millions of millions of vibrations have to penetrate the eye before the eye can distinguish the tints of a violet.
-
Nothing really immoral is ever permanently popular.
-
In all cases of heart-ache, the application of another man's disappointment draws out the pain and allays the irritation.
-
It is an error to suppose that courage means courage in everything.
-
When the world frowns, we can face it; but let it smile, and we are undone.
-
What, after all, is heaven, but a transition from dim guesses and blind struggling with a mysterious and adverse fate to the fullness of all wisdom--from ignorance, in a word, to knowledge, but knowledge of what order?
-
We lose the peace of years when we hunt after the rapture of moments.
-
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.
-
I have wrought great use out of evil tools.
-
Man only of all earthly creatures, asks, Can the dead die forever? - and the instinct that urges the question is God's answer to man, for no instinct is given in vain.
-
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.
-
To the thinker, the most trifling external object often suggests ideas, which, like Homer's chain, extend, link after link, from earth to heaven.
-
When some one sorrow, that is yet reparable, gets hold of your mind like a monomania,--when you think, because Heaven has denied you this or that, on which you had set your heart, that all your life must be a blank,--oh, then diet yourself well on biography,--the biography of good and great men. See how little a space one sorrow really makes in life. See scarce a page, perhaps, given to some grief similar to your own, and how triumphantly the life sails on beyond it.
-
Toil to some is happiness, and rest to others. This man can only breathe in crowds, and that man only in solitudes.
-
Nothing but real love--(how rare it is; has one human heart in a million ever known it?) nothing but real love can repay us for the loss of freedom--the cares and fears of poverty--the cold pity of the world that we both despise and respect.
-
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.
-
There is no society, however free and democratic, where wealth will not create an aristocracy.
-
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.
-
Our ideas, like orange-plants, spread out in proportion to the size of the box which imprisons the roots.