Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton Quotes
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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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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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Grief alone can teach us what is man.
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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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When one is in a good sound rage, it is astonishing how calm one can be.
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Prudence, patience, labor, valor; these are the stars that rule the career of mortals.
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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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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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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.
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Our very wretchedness grows dear to us when suffering for one we love.
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Let us fill urns with rose-leaves in May And hive the the trifty sweetness for December!
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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.
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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.
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In solitude the passions feed upon the heart.
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To judge human character rightly, a man may sometimes have very small experience, provided he has a very large heart.
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Bright and illustrious illusions!
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The worst part of an eminent man's conversation is, nine times out of ten, to be found in that part by which he means to be clever.
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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 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.
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The learned compute that seven hundred and seven millions of millions of vibrations have to penetrate the eye before the eye can distinguish the tints of a violet.
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Earnest men never think in vain, though their thoughts may be errors.
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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.
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Out of the ashes of misanthropy benevolence rises again; we find many virtues where we had imagined all was vice, many acts of disinterested friendship where we had fancied all was calculation and fraud--and so gradually from the two extremes we pass to the proper medium; and, feeling that no human being is wholly good or wholly base, we learn that true knowledge of mankind which induces us to expect little and forgive much. The world cures alike the optimist and the misanthrope.
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A fresh mind keeps the body fresh. Take in the ideas of the day, drain off those of yesterday.