Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton Quotes
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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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It is an error to suppose that courage means courage in everything. Most people are brave only in the dangers to which they accustom themselves, either in imagination or practice.
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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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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.
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Beside one deed of guilt, how blest is guiltless woe!
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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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What, after all, is heaven, but a transition from dim guesses and blind struggling with a mysterious and adverse fate to the fullness of all wisdom--from ignorance, in a word, to knowledge, but knowledge of what order?
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Only by the candle, held in the skeleton hand of Poverty, can man read his own dark heart.
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Agreeable surprises are the perquisites of youth.
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Alas! innocence is but a poor substitute for experience.
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Life, that ever needs forgiveness, has, for its first duty, to forgive.
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Trees that, like the poplar, lift upward all their boughs, give no shade and no shelter, whatever their height. Trees the most lovingly shelter and shade us, when, like the willow, the higher soar their summits, the lower drop their boughs.
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Despair makes victims sometimes victors.
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Nothing so good as a university education, nor worse than a university without its education.
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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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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.
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As a general rule, people who flagrantly pretend to anything are the reverse of that which they pretend to. A man who sets up for a saint is sure to be a sinner; and a man who boasts that he is a sinner is sure to have some feeble, maudlin, snivelling bit of saintship about him which is enough to make him a humbug.
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Archaeology is not only the hand maid of history, it is also the conservator of art.
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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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Patience is a good palfrey, and will carry us a long day.
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Never get a reputation for a small perfection if you are trying for fame in a loftier area. The world can only judge by generals, and it sees that those who pay considerable attention to minutiae seldom have their minds occupied with great things.
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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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In some exquisite critical hints on "Eurythmy," Goethe remarks, "that the best composition in pictures is that which, observing the most delicate laws of harmony, so arranges the objects that they by their position tell their own story." And the rule thus applied to composition in painting applies no less to composition in literature.
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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.