Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton Quotes
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The vices and the virtues are written in a language the world cannot construe; it reads them in a vile translation, and the translators are Failure and Success.
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As the excitement of the game increases, prudence is sure to diminish.
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Of all the weaknesses little men rail against, there is none that they are more apt to ridicule than the tendency to believe. And of all the signs of a corrupt heart and a feeble head, the tendency of incredulity is the surest. Real philosophy seeks rather to solve than to deny.
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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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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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My father died shortly after I was twenty-one; and being left well off, and having a taste for travel and adventure, I resigned, for a time, all pursuit of the almighty dollar, and became a desultory wanderer over the face of the earth.
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Our ideas, like orange-plants, spread out in proportion to the size of the box which imprisons the roots.
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To live On means not yours--be brave in silks and laces, Gallant in steeds; splendid in banquets; all Not yours. Given, uninherited, unpaid for; This is to be a trickster; and to filch Men's art and labour, which to them is wealth, Life, daily bread;--quitting all scores with "friend, You're troublesome!" Why this, forgive me, Is what, when done with a less dainty grace, Plain folks call "Theft.
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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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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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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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Ah, what without a heaven would be even love!--a perpetual terror of the separation that must one day come.
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Every man loves and admires his own country because it produced him.
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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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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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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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Imitation, if noble and general, insures the best hope of originality.
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Never, be argued out of your soul, never be argued out of your honor, and never be argued into believing that soul and honor do not run a terrible risk if you limp into life with the load of a debt on your shoulders.
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Men are valued, not for what they are, but for what they seem to be.
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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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We lose the peace of years when we hunt after the rapture of moments.
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Beside one deed of guilt, how blest is guiltless woe!
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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.