Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton Quotes
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Ambition has no rest.
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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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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.
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Days are like years in the love of the young, when no bar, no obstacle, is between their hearts,--when the sun shines, and the course runs smooth--when their love is prosperous and confessed.
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As the excitement of the game increases, prudence is sure to diminish.
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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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When one is in a good sound rage, it is astonishing how calm one can be.
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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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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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What a rare gift, by the by, is that of manners! how difficult to define, how much more difficult to impart! Better for a man to possess them than wealth, beauty, or talent; they will more than supply all.
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I was always an early riser. Happy the man who is! Every morning day comes to him with a virgin's love, full of bloom and freshness. The youth of nature is contagious, like the gladness of a happy child.
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Revolutions are not made with rosewater.
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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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In every civilized society there is found a race of men who retain the instincts of the aboriginal cannibal and live upon their fellow-men as a natural food.
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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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Men of strong affections are jealous of their own genius. They fear lest they should be loved for a quality, and not for themselves.
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The vices and the virtues are written in a language the world cannot construe; it reads them in a vile translation, and the translators are Failure and Success.
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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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Talk not of genius baffled. Genius is master of man. Genius does what it must, and Talent does what it can.
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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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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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There is but one philosophy and its name is fortitude! To bear is to conquer our fate.
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Agreeable surprises are the perquisites of youth.
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There is an ill-breeding to which, whatever our rank and nature, we are almost equally sensitive, the ill-breeding that comes from want of consideration for others.