Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton Quotes
-
There is certainly something of exquisite kindness and thoughtful benevolence in that rarest of gifts,--fine breeding.
-
Earnestness is the best gift of mental power, and deficiency of heart is the cause of many men never becoming great.
-
When one is in a good sound rage, it is astonishing how calm one can be.
-
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.
-
Grief alone can teach us what is man.
-
If a good face is a letter of recommendation, a good heart is a letter of credit.
-
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.
-
Faith builds in the dungeon and lazarhouse its sublimest shrines; and up, through roofs of stone, that shut out the eye of heaven, ascends the ladder where the angels glide to and fro,--prayer.
-
Some have the temperament and tastes of genius, without its creative power. They feel acutely, but express tamely.
-
Nothing but real love--(how rare it is; has one human heart in a million ever known it?) nothing but real love can repay us for the loss of freedom--the cares and fears of poverty--the cold pity of the world that we both despise and respect.
-
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.
-
A fresh mind keeps the body fresh. Take in the ideas of the day, drain off those of yesterday.
-
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.
-
Business first, then pleasure.
-
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.
-
There is a great deal we never think of calling religion that is still fruit unto God, and garnered by Him in the harvest. The fruits of the Spirit are love, joy, peace, long suffering, gentleness, patience, goodness. I affirm that if these fruits are found in any form, whether you show your patience as a woman nursing a fretful child, or as a man attending to the vexing detail of a business, or as a physician following the dark mazes of sickness, or as a mechanic fitting the joints and valves of a locomotive; being honest true besides, you bring forth truth unto God.
-
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.
-
Life, that ever needs forgiveness, has, for its first duty, to forgive.
-
Shame is like the weaver's thread; if it breaks in the net, it is wholly imperfect.
-
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.
-
He whom God hath gifted with a love of retirement possesses, as it were, an extra sense.
-
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.
-
I believe that there is much less difference between the author and his works than is currently supposed; it is usually in the physical appearance of the writer,--his manners, his mien, his exterior,--that he falls short of the ideal a reasonable man forms of him--rarely in his mind.
-
Ah, what without a heaven would be even love!--a perpetual terror of the separation that must one day come.