Edward Bulwer-Lytton Quotes

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The heart of a man's like that delicate weed, / Which requires to be trampled on, boldly indeed / Ere it gives forth the fragrance you wish to extract.

Edward Bulwer-Lytton
There are two avenues from the little passions and the drear calamities of earth; both lead to the heaven and away from hell-Art and Science. But art is more godlike than science; science discovers, art creates.

Edward Bulwer-Lytton
Not in the knowledge of things without, but in the perfection of the soul within, lies the empire of man aspiring to be more than man.

Edward Bulwer-Lytton
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.

Edward Bulwer-Lytton
Of all the conditions to which the heart is subject suspense is one that most gnaws and cankers into the frame. One little month of that suspense, when it involves death, we are told by an eye witness in "Wakefield on the Punishment of Death," is sufficient to plough fixed lines and furrows in a convict of five and twenty,--sufficient, to dash the brown hair with grey, and to bleach the grey to white.

Edward Bulwer-Lytton
In science, address the few, in literature the many. In science, the few must dictate opinion to the many; in literature, the many, sooner or later, force their judgement on the few.

Edward Bulwer-Lytton
When you borrow on your character, it is your character that you leave in pawn.

Edward Bulwer-Lytton
The great secrets of being courted are, to shun others, and seem delighted with yourself.

Edward Bulwer-Lytton
The affections are immortal! They are the sympathies which unite the ceaseless generations.

Edward Bulwer-Lytton
The astronomer who catalogues the stars cannot add one atom to the universe; the poet can call an universe from the atom.

Edward Bulwer-Lytton
Men who make money rarely saunter; men who save money rarely swagger.

Edward Bulwer-Lytton
Tell me, sweet eyes, from what divinest star did ye drink in your liquid melancholy?

Edward Bulwer-Lytton
Nothing can constitute good-breeding that has not good-nature for its foundation.

Edward Bulwer-Lytton
Self-confidence is not hope; it is the self-judgment of your own internal forces in their relation to the world without, which results from the failure of many hopes and the non-realization of many fears.

Edward Bulwer-Lytton
Love is the business of the idle, but the idleness of the busy.

Edward Bulwer-Lytton
People who are very vain are usually equally susceptible; and they who feel one thing acutely, will so feel another.

Edward Bulwer-Lytton
A man's heart must be very frivolous if the possession of fame rewards the labor to attain it. For the worst of reputation is that it is not palpable or present - we do not feel or see or taste it.

Edward Bulwer-Lytton
Invention is nothing more than a fine deviation from, or enlargement on a fine model...

Edward Bulwer-Lytton
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.

Edward Bulwer-Lytton
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.

Edward Bulwer-Lytton
It may, indeed, be said that sympathy exists in all minds, as Faraday has discovered that magnetism exists in all metals; but a certain temperature is required to develop the hidden property, whether in the metal or the mind.

Edward Bulwer-Lytton
Childhood and genius have the same master organ in common - inquisitiveness.

Edward Bulwer-Lytton
The fewer blows, the better. Brave men fight if they must; wise men never fight if they can help it.

Edward Bulwer-Lytton
In life, as in whist, hope nothing from the way cards may be dealt to you. Play the cards, whatever they be, to the best of your skill.

Edward Bulwer-Lytton
Every great man exhibits the talent of organization or construction, whether it be in a poem, a philosophical system, a policy, or a strategy. And without method there is no organization nor construction.

Edward Bulwer-Lytton
If you are in doubt whether to write a letter or not, don't. And the advice applies to many doubts in life besides that of letter writing.

Edward Bulwer-Lytton
The more I think of a people calmly developing, in regions excluded from our sight and deemed uninhabitable by our sages, powers surpassing our most disciplined modes of force, and virtues to which our life, social and political, becomes antagonistic in proportion as our civilisation advances - the more devoutly I pray that ages may yet elapse before there emerge into sunlight our inevitable destroyers.

Edward Bulwer-Lytton
In families well ordered, there is always one firm, sweet temper, which controls without seeming to dictate. The Greeks represented Persuasion as crowned.

Edward Bulwer-Lytton
Husband and wife have so many interests in common that when they have jogged through the ups and downs of life a sufficient time, the leash which at first galled often grows easy and familiar.

Edward Bulwer-Lytton
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.

Edward Bulwer-Lytton