Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton Quotes
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The law is a gun, which if it misses a pigeon always kills a crow; if it does not strike the guilty, it hits someone else. As every crime creates a law, so in turn every law creates a crime.
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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.
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As the films of clay are removed from our eyes, Death loses the false aspect of the spectre, and we fall at last into its arms as a wearied child upon the bosom of its mother.
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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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Woman makes half the sorrows which she boasts the privilege to sooth. Woman consoles us, it is true, while we are young and handsome; when we are old and ugly, woman snubs and scolds us. On the whole, then, woman in this scale, the weed in that. Jupiter! Hang out thy balance, and weigh them both; and if thou give the preference to woman, all I can say is, the next time Juno ruffles thee, O Jupiter, try the weed.
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A fresh mind keeps the body fresh. Take in the ideas of the day, drain off those of yesterday.
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In beginning the world, if you don't wish to get chafed at every turn, fold up your pride carefully, put it under lock and key, and only let it out to air upon grand occasions. Pride is a garment all stiff brocade outside, all grating sackcloth on the side next to the skin.
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Alas! innocence is but a poor substitute for experience.
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Read to live, not live to read.
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There is certainly something of exquisite kindness and thoughtful benevolence in that rarest of gifts,--fine breeding.
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The strong and virtuous admit no destiny.
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Men are valued, not for what they are, but for what they seem to be.
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The food of hope is meditative action.
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A mind once cultivated will not lie fallow for half an hour.
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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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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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If you are in doubt whether to write a letter or not, don't. And the advice applies to many doubts in life besides that of letter writing.
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In families well ordered, there is always one firm, sweet temper, which controls without seeming to dictate. The Greeks represented Persuasion as crowned.
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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 times when the mirth of others only saddens us, especially the mirth of children with high spirits, that jar on our own quiet mood.
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Agreeable surprises are the perquisites of youth.
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We must remember how apt man is to extremes--rushing from credulity and weakness to suspicion and distrust.
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We are not such fools as to pay for reading inferior books, when we can read superior books for nothing.
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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.