Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton Quotes
-
Men who make money rarely saunter; men who save money rarely swagger.
-
Fine natures are like fine poems; a glance at the first two lines suffices for a guess into the beauty that waits you if you read on.
-
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?
-
To how many is the death of the beloved the parent of faith!
-
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.
-
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.
-
Julius Caesar owed two millions when he risked the experiment of being general in Gaul. If Julius Caesar had not lived to cross the Rubicon, and pay off his debts, what would his creditors have called Julius Caesar?
-
Beside one deed of guilt, how blest is guiltless woe!
-
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.
-
Love is rarely a hypocrite; but hate--how detect and how guard against it! It lurks where you least expect it; it is created by causes that you can the least foresee; and civilization multiplies its varieties, whilst it favors its disguise.
-
Fate laughs at probabilities.
-
I would rather have five energetic and competent enemies than one fool friend.
-
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.
-
Our very wretchedness grows dear to us when suffering for one we love.
-
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.
-
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.
-
Men are valued, not for what they are, but for what they seem to be.
-
Happy is the man who hath never known what it is to taste of fame - to have it is a purgatory, to want it is a hell.
-
Earnestness is the best gift of mental power, and deficiency of heart is the cause of many men never becoming great.
-
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.
-
There is certainly something of exquisite kindness and thoughtful benevolence in that rarest of gifts,--fine breeding.
-
Bright and illustrious illusions!
-
Debt is to man what the serpent is to the bird; its eye fascinates, its breath poisons, its coil crushes sinew and bone, its jaw is the pitiless grave.
-
When one is in a good sound rage, it is astonishing how calm one can be.