Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton Quotes
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Despair makes victims sometimes victors.
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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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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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Let us fill urns with rose-leaves in May And hive the the trifty sweetness for December!
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At court one becomes a sort of human ant eater, and learns to catch one's prey by one's tongue.
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I would rather have five energetic and competent enemies than one fool friend.
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Writers are the main landmarks of the past.
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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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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 did not fall into love - I rose into love.
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Alas! innocence is but a poor substitute for experience.
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Reading without purpose is sauntering not exercise.
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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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He whom God hath gifted with a love of retirement possesses, as it were, an extra sense.
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There is no society, however free and democratic, where wealth will not create an aristocracy.
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Grief alone can teach us what is man.
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As the excitement of the game increases, prudence is sure to diminish.
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In all cases of heart-ache, the application of another man's disappointment draws out the pain and allays the irritation.
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Of all the weaknesses little men rail against, there is none that they are more apt to ridicule than the tendency to believe. And of all the signs of a corrupt heart and a feeble head, the tendency of incredulity is the surest. Real philosophy seeks rather to solve than to deny.
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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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He who writes prose builds his temple to Fame in rubble; he who writes verses builds it in granite.
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Nothing so good as a university education, nor worse than a university without its education.
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To live On means not yours--be brave in silks and laces, Gallant in steeds; splendid in banquets; all Not yours. Given, uninherited, unpaid for; This is to be a trickster; and to filch Men's art and labour, which to them is wealth, Life, daily bread;--quitting all scores with "friend, You're troublesome!" Why this, forgive me, Is what, when done with a less dainty grace, Plain folks call "Theft.
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There are two lives to each of us, the life of our actions, and the life of our minds and hearts. History reveals men's deeds and their outward characters, but not themselves. There is a secret self that has its own life, unpenetrated and unguessed.