Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton Quotes
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Books are but waste paper unless we spend in action the wisdom we get from thought.
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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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It is only in some corner of the brain which we leave empty that Vice can obtain a lodging. When she knocks at your door be able to say: "No room for your ladyship; pass on.
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Imitation, if noble and general, insures the best hope of originality.
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Bright and illustrious illusions!
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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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There is certainly something of exquisite kindness and thoughtful benevolence in that rarest of gifts,--fine breeding.
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Man must be disappointed with the lesser things of life before he can comprehend the full value of the greater.
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Archaeology is not only the hand maid of history, it is also the conservator of art.
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A man is arrogant in proportion to his ignorance. Man's natural tendency is to egotism. Man, in his infancy of knowledge, thinks that all creation was formed for him.
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Come, Death, and snatch me from disgrace.
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There is no society, however free and democratic, where wealth will not create an aristocracy.
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The faults of a brilliant writer are never dangerous on the long run; a thousand people read his work who would read no other; inquiry is directed to each of his doctrines; it is soon discovered what is sound and what is false; the sound become maxims, and the false beacons.
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Men are valued, not for what they are, but for what they seem to be.
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What is human is immortal!
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Let youth cherish sleep, the happiest of earthly boons, while yet it is at its command; for there cometh the day to all when "neither the voice of the lute nor the birds" shall bring back the sweet slumbers that fell on their young eyes as unbidden as the dews.
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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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In these days half our diseases come from neglect of the body in overwork of the brain.
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Common sense is only a modification of talent. Genius is an exaltation of it. The difference is, therefore, in degree, not nature.
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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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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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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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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.