Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton Quotes
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Dandies, when first-rate, are generally very agreeable men.
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Revolutions are not made with rosewater.
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Ah, what without a heaven would be even love!--a perpetual terror of the separation that must one day come.
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Beside one deed of guilt, how blest is guiltless woe!
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Our glories float between the earth and heaven Like clouds which seem pavilions of the sun, And are the playthings of the casual wind.
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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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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.
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Patience is a good palfrey, and will carry us a long day.
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Childhood and genius have the same master organ in common - inquisitiveness.
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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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I would rather have five energetic and competent enemies than one fool friend.
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The poet in prose or verse - the creator - can only stamp his images forcibly on the page in proportion as he has forcibly felt, ardently nursed, and long brooded over them.
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It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents - except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness.
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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.
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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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Men are valued, not for what they are, but for what they seem to be.
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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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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.
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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?
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Earnestness is the best gift of mental power, and deficiency of heart is the cause of many men never becoming great.
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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.
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The higher the rank the less pretence, because there is less to pretend to.
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Some have the temperament and tastes of genius, without its creative power. They feel acutely, but express tamely.