Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton Quotes
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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.
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We lose the peace of years when we hunt after the rapture of moments.
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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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Reading without purpose is sauntering not exercise.
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Beside one deed of guilt, how blest is guiltless woe!
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Good humor is the sunshine of the mind.
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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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Happy indeed the poet of whom, like Orpheus, nothing is known but an immortal name! Happy next, perhaps, the poet of whom, like Homer, nothing is known but the immortal works. The more the merely human part of the poet remains a mystery, the more willing is the reverence given to his divine mission.
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In all cases of heart-ache, the application of another man's disappointment draws out the pain and allays the irritation.
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I have wrought great use out of evil tools.
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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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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.
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Agreeable surprises are the perquisites of youth.
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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.
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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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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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Imitation, if noble and general, insures the best hope of originality.
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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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We are not such fools as to pay for reading inferior books, when we can read superior books for nothing.
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Love is a very contradiction of all the elements of our ordinary nature -- it makes the proud man meek -- the cheerful, sad -- the high-spirited, tame; our strongest resolutions, our hardiest energy fail before it. Believe me, you cannot prophesy of its future effect in a man from any knowledge of his past character.
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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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Remedy your deficiencies, and your merits will take care of themselves. Every man has in him good and evil. His good is his valiant army, his evil is his corrupt commissariat; reform the commissariat and the army will do its duty.
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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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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?