Edward Bulwer-Lytton Quotes

214 Sourced Quotes

Beneath the rule of men entirely great
The pen is mightier than the sword.

Edward Bulwer-Lytton
The true spirit of conversation consists in building on another man's observation, not overturning it.

Edward Bulwer-Lytton
When a person's down in the world, I think an ounce of help is better than a pound of preaching.

Edward Bulwer-Lytton
A fool…flatters himself—a wise man flatters the fool.

Edward Bulwer-Lytton
A good heart is better than all the heads in the world.

Edward Bulwer-Lytton
A fresh mind keeps the body fresh. Take in the ideas of the day, drain off those of yesterday. As to the morrow, time enough to consider it when it becomes today.

Edward Bulwer-Lytton
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.

Edward Bulwer-Lytton
That man will never be a perfect gentleman who lives only with gentlemen. To be a man of the world we must view that world in every grade and in every perspective.

Edward Bulwer-Lytton
There is one form of hope which is never unwise, and which certainly does not diminish with the increase of knowledge. In that form it changes its name, and we call it patience.

Edward Bulwer-Lytton
Say what we will, you may be sure that ambition is an error; its wear and tear of heart are never recompensed, -it steals away the freshness of life, -it deadens its vivid and social enjoyments, -it shuts our souls to our own youth, -and we are old ere we remember that we have made a fever and a labor of our raciest years.

Edward Bulwer-Lytton
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.

Edward Bulwer-Lytton
A man of genius is inexhaustible only in proportion as he is always renourishing his genius.

Edward Bulwer-Lytton
Business dispatched is business well done, but business hurried is business ill done.

Edward Bulwer-Lytton
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.

Edward Bulwer-Lytton
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.

Edward Bulwer-Lytton
A man's own conscience is his sole tribunal, and he should care no more for that phantom "opinion" than he should fear meeting a ghost if he crossed the churchyard at dark.

Edward Bulwer-Lytton
Wrap thyself in the decent veil that the arts or the graces weave for thee, O human nature! It is only the statue of marble whose nakedness the eye can behold without shame and offence!

Edward Bulwer-Lytton
Westward, beyond the still pleasant, but, even then, no longer solitary, hamlet of Charing, a broad space, broken here and there by scattered houses and venerable pollards, in the early spring of 1467, presented the rural scene for the sports and pastimes of the inhabitants of Westminister and London.

Edward Bulwer-Lytton
Keep unscathed the good name; keep out of peril the honor without which even your battered old soldier who is hobbling into his grave on half-pay and a wooden leg would not change with Achilles.

Edward Bulwer-Lytton
Genius in the poet, like the nomad of Arabia, ever a wanderer, still ever makes a home where the well or the palm-tree invites it to pitch the tent. Perpetually passing out of himself and his own positive circumstantial condition of being into other hearts and into other conditions, the poet obtains his knowledge of human life by transporting his own life into the lives of others.

Edward Bulwer-Lytton
Irony is to the high-bred what billingsgate is to the vulgar; and when one gentleman thinks another gentleman an ass, he does not say it point-blank, he implies it in the politest terms he can invent.

Edward Bulwer-Lytton
A gentleman's taste in dress is upon principle, the avoidance of all things extravagant. It consists in the quiet simplicity of exquisite neatness; but, as the neatness must be a neatness in fashion, employ the best tailor; pay him ready money, and, on the whole, you wi11 find him the cheapest.

Edward Bulwer-Lytton
To the thinker, the most trifling external object often suggests ideas, which, like Homer's chain, extend, link after link, from earth to heaven.

Edward Bulwer-Lytton
Ask any school-boy up to the age of fifteen where he would spend his holidays. Not one in five hundred will say, "In the streets of London," if you give him the option of green fields and running waters. It is, then, a fair presumption that there must be something of the child still in the character of the men or the women whom the country charms in maturer as in dawning life.

Edward Bulwer-Lytton
Julius Caesar owed two millions when he risked the experiment of being general in Gaul. If Julius Caesar had not lived to cross the Rubicon, and pay off his debts, what would his creditors have called Julius Caesar?

Edward Bulwer-Lytton
Fortune is said to be blind, but her favorites never are. Ambition has the eye of the eagle, prudence that of the lynx; the first looks through the air, the last along the ground.

Edward Bulwer-Lytton
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.

Edward Bulwer-Lytton
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.

Edward Bulwer-Lytton
Keep we to the broad truths before us; duty here; knowledge comes alone in the Hereafter.

Edward Bulwer-Lytton
We love the beautiful and serene, but we have a feeling as deep as love for the terrible and dark.

Edward Bulwer-Lytton