Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton Quotes
-
In how large a proportion of creatures is existence composed of one ruling passion, the most agonizing of all sensations--fear.
-
Nine times out of ten it is over the Bridge of Sighs that we pass the narrow gulf from youth to manhood. That interval is usually marked by an ill placed or disappointed affection. We recover and we find ourselves a new being. The intellect has become hardened by the fire through which it has passed. The mind profits by the wrecks of every passion, and we may measure our road to wisdom by the sorrows we have undergone.
-
Common sense is only a modification of talent. Genius is an exaltation of it. The difference is, therefore, in degree, not nature.
-
There is no past, as long as books shall live. Books make the past our heritage and our home.
-
Tell me, sweet eyes, from what divinest star did ye drink in your liquid melancholy?
-
Philosophers have done wisely when they have told us to cultivate our reason rather than our feelings, for reason reconciles us to the daily things of existence; our feelings teach us to yearn after the far, the difficult, the unseen.
-
Every man loves and admires his own country because it produced him.
-
The first essential to success in the art you practice is respect for the art itself.
-
Love is rarely a hypocrite; but hate--how detect and how guard against it! It lurks where you least expect it; it is created by causes that you can the least foresee; and civilization multiplies its varieties, whilst it favors its disguise.
-
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.
-
It is the glorious doom of literature that the evil perishes and the good remains.
-
Philosophy, while it soothes the reason, damps the ambition.
-
Birds sing in vain to the ear, flowers bloom in vain to the eye, of mortified vanity and galled ambition. He who would know repose in retirement must carry into retirement his destiny, integral and serene, as the Caesars transported the statue of Fortune into the chamber they chose for their sleep.
-
It is an error to suppose that courage means courage in everything. Most people are brave only in the dangers to which they accustom themselves, either in imagination or practice.
-
Money is a terrible blab; she will betray the secrets of her owner, whatever he do to gag her. His virtues will creep out in her whisper; his vices she will cry aloud at the top of her tongue.
-
Of all the virtues necessary to the completion of the perfect man, there is none to be more delicately implied and less ostentatiously vaunted than that of exquisite feeling or universal benevolence.
-
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.
-
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.
-
Earnest men never think in vain, though their thoughts may be errors.
-
There's no weapon that slays its victim so surely if well aimed as praise.
-
Midnight, and love, and youth, and Italy!
-
Time, O my friend, is money! Time wasted can never conduce to money well managed.
-
Come, Death, and snatch me from disgrace.
-
It is a very high mind to which gratitude is not a painful sensation. If you wish to please, you will find it wiser to receive, solicit even, favors, than accord them; for the vanity of the obligor is always flattered, that of the obligee rarely.