Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton Quotes
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You know There are moments when silence, prolonged and unbroken, More expressive may be than all words ever spoken.
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It is difficult to say who do you the most mischief, enemies with the worst intentions, or friends with the best.
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What a mistake to suppose that the passions are strongest in youth! The passions are not stronger, but the control over them is weaker! They are more easily excited, they are more violent and apparent; but they have less energy, less durability, less intense and concentrated power than in maturer life.
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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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Men are valued, not for what they are, but for what they seem to be.
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There's no weapon that slays its victim so surely if well aimed as praise.
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What a rare gift, by the by, is that of manners! how difficult to define, how much more difficult to impart! Better for a man to possess them than wealth, beauty, or talent; they will more than supply all.
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The food of hope is meditative action.
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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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Read to live, not live to read.
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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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Art does not imitate nature, but founds itself on the study of nature, takes from nature the selections which best accord with its own intention, and then bestows on them that which nature does not possess, viz: The mind and soul of man.
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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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Bright and illustrious illusions!
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The world thinks eccentricity in great things is genius, but in small things, only crazy.
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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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The first essential to success in the art you practice is respect for the art itself.
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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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Prudence, patience, labor, valor; these are the stars that rule the career of mortals.
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Beautiful eyes in the face of a handsome woman are like eloquence to speech.
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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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Poverty has strange bedfellows.
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What is human is immortal!
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But never yet the dog our country fed, Betrayed the kindness or forgot the bread.