Edward Bulwer-Lytton Quotes

214 Sourced Quotes

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.

Edward Bulwer-Lytton
Art itself is essentially ethical; because every true work of art must have a beauty or grandeur of some kind, and beauty and grandeur cannot be comprehended by the beholder except through the moral sentiment. The eye is only a witness; it is not a judge. The mind judges what the eye reports to it; therefore, whatever elevates the moral sentiment to the contemplation of beauty and grandeur is in itself ethical.

Edward Bulwer-Lytton
He who esteems trifles for themselves is a trifler; he who esteems them for the conclusions to be drawn from them, or the advantage to which they can be put, is a philosopher.

Edward Bulwer-Lytton
There is certainly something of exquisite kindness and thoughtful benevolence in that rarest of gifts,--fine breeding.

Edward Bulwer-Lytton
There is no tongue that flatters like a lover's; and yet, in the exaggeration of his feelings, flattery seems to him commonplace. Strange and prodigal exuberance, which soon exhausts itself by flowing!

Edward Bulwer-Lytton
Why should the soul ever repose? God, its Principle, reposes never.

Edward Bulwer-Lytton
Earnest men never think in vain, though their thoughts may be errors.

Edward Bulwer-Lytton
He who seeks repentance for the past, should woo the angel virtue for the future.

Edward Bulwer-Lytton
Certain I am that every author who has written a book with earnest forethought and fondly cherished designs will bear testimony to the fact that much which he meant to convey has never been guessed at in any review of his work; and many a delicate beauty of thought, on which he principally valued himself, remains, like the statue of Isis, an image of truth from which no hand lifts the veil.

Edward Bulwer-Lytton
There is no policy like politeness; and a good manner is the best thing in the world either to get a good name, or to supply the want of it.

Edward Bulwer-Lytton
The brave man wants no charms to encourage him to his duty, and the good man scorns all warnings that would deter him from fulfilling it.

Edward Bulwer-Lytton
A woman too often reasons from her heart; hence two-thirds of her mistakes and her troubles.

Edward Bulwer-Lytton
Centuries roll, customs change, but, ever since the time of the earliest mother, woman yearns to be the soother.

Edward Bulwer-Lytton
Ere yet we yearn for what is out of our reach, we are still in the cradle. When wearied out with our yearnings, desire again falls asleep; we are on the death-bed.

Edward Bulwer-Lytton
We lose the peace of years when we hunt after the rapture of moments.

Edward Bulwer-Lytton
To mourn deeply for the death of another loosens from myself the petty desire for, and the animal adherence to life. We have gained the end of the philosopher, and view without shrinking the coffin and the pall.

Edward Bulwer-Lytton
When you talk to the half-wise, twaddle; when you talk to the ignorant, brag; when you talk to the sagacious, look very humble and ask their opinion.

Edward Bulwer-Lytton
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?

Edward Bulwer-Lytton
The secret of fashion is to surprise and never to disappoint.

Edward Bulwer-Lytton
Character is money; and according as the man earns or spends the money, money in turn becomes character. As money is the most evident power in the world's uses, so the use that he makes of money is often all that the world knows about a man.

Edward Bulwer-Lytton
More bounteous run rivers when the ice that locked their flow melts into their waters. And when fine natures relent, their kindness is swelled by the thaw.

Edward Bulwer-Lytton
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.

Edward Bulwer-Lytton
In the hour of strait and need, we measure men's stature not by the body, but the soul!

Edward Bulwer-Lytton
Fine natures are like fine poems; a glance at the first two lines suffices for a guess into the beauty that waits you if you read on.

Edward Bulwer-Lytton
Whatever the number of a man's friends, there will be times in his life when he has one too few; but if he has only one enemy, he is lucky indeed if he has not one too many.

Edward Bulwer-Lytton
Time, O my friend, is money! Time wasted can never conduce to money well managed.

Edward Bulwer-Lytton
Only by the candle, held in the skeleton hand of Poverty, can man read his own dark heart.

Edward Bulwer-Lytton
It is the glorious doom of literature that the evil perishes and the good remains.

Edward Bulwer-Lytton
The more the merely human part of the poet remains a mystery, the more willing is the reverence given to his divine mission.

Edward Bulwer-Lytton
People praise us behind our backs, but we hear them not; few before our faces, and who is not suspicious of the truth of such praise?

Edward Bulwer-Lytton