Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton Quotes
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The man who has acquired the habit of study, though for only one hour every day in the year, and keeps to the one thing studied till it is mastered, will be startled to see the way he has made at the end of a twelvemonth.
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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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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.
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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.
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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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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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Genius, the Pythian of the beautiful, leaves its large truths a riddle to the dull.
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If a good face is a letter of recommendation, a good heart is a letter of credit.
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The strong and virtuous admit no destiny.
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Every man loves and admires his own country because it produced him.
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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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Despair makes victims sometimes victors.
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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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Not in the knowledge of things without, but in the perfection of the soul within, lies the empire of man aspiring to be more than man.
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Society is a long series of uprising ridges, which from the first to the last offer no valley of repose. Whenever you take your stand, you are looked down upon by those above you, and reviled and pelted by those below you. Every creature you see is a farthing Sisyphus, pushing his little stone up some Liliputian mole-hill. This is our world.
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I would rather have five energetic and competent enemies than one fool friend.
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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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As the excitement of the game increases, prudence is sure to diminish.
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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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Every great man exhibits the talent of organization or construction, whether it be in a poem, a philosophical system, a policy, or a strategy. And without method there is no organization nor construction.
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Men who make money rarely saunter; men who save money rarely swagger.
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Nothing so good as a university education, nor worse than a university without its education.
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Happy indeed the poet of whom, like Orpheus, nothing is known but an immortal name! Happy next, perhaps, the poet of whom, like Homer, nothing is known but the immortal works. The more the merely human part of the poet remains a mystery, the more willing is the reverence given to his divine mission.
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Agreeable surprises are the perquisites of youth.