Edward Bulwer-Lytton Quotes

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Debt is to man what the serpent is to the bird; its eye fascinates, its breath poisons, its coil crushes sinew and bone, its jaw is the pitiless grave.

Edward Bulwer-Lytton
There is an ill-breeding to which, whatever our rank and nature, we are almost equally sensitive, the ill-breeding that comes from want of consideration for others.

Edward Bulwer-Lytton
Could we know by what strange circumstances a man's genius became prepared for practical success, we should discover that the most serviceable items in his education were never entered in the bills which his father paid for.

Edward Bulwer-Lytton
Money never can be well managed if sought solely through the greed of money for its own sake. In all meanness there is a defect of intellect as well as of heart. And even the cleverness of avarice is but the cunning of imbecility.

Edward Bulwer-Lytton
In every civilized society there is found a race of men who retain the instincts of the aboriginal cannibal and live upon their fellow-men as a natural food.

Edward Bulwer-Lytton
Love is a very contradiction of all the elements of our ordinary nature -- it makes the proud man meek -- the cheerful, sad -- the high-spirited, tame; our strongest resolutions, our hardiest energy fail before it. Believe me, you cannot prophesy of its future effect in a man from any knowledge of his past character.

Edward Bulwer-Lytton
The first essential to success in the art you practice is respect for the art itself.

Edward Bulwer-Lytton
You know There are moments when silence, prolonged and unbroken, More expressive may be than all words ever spoken.

Edward Bulwer-Lytton
Nothing so good as a university education, nor worse than a university without its education.

Edward Bulwer-Lytton
Genius, the Pythian of the beautiful, leaves its large truths a riddle to the dull.

Edward Bulwer-Lytton
It is often the easiest move that completes the game. Fortune is like the lady whom a lover carried off from all his rivals by putting an additional lace upon his liveries.

Edward Bulwer-Lytton
The circle of life is cut up into segments. All lines are equal if they are drawn from the centre and touch the circumference.

Edward Bulwer-Lytton
When a man is not amused, he feels an involuntary contempt for those who are.

Edward Bulwer-Lytton
Every man of sound brain whom you meet knows something worth knowing better than yourself. A man, on the whole, is a better preceptor than a book. But what scholar does not allow that the dullest book can suggest to him a new and a sound idea?

Edward Bulwer-Lytton
He whom God hath gifted with a love of retirement possesses, as it were, an extra sense.

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
Life is short - while we speak it flies; enjoy, then, the present, and forget the future; such is the moral of ancient poetry, a graceful and a wise moral - indulged beneath a southern sky, and all deserving, the phrase applied to it - the philosophy of the garden.

Edward Bulwer-Lytton
Prudence, patience, labor, valor; these are the stars that rule the career of mortals.

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 we to the broad truths before us; duty here; knowledge comes alone in the Hereafter.

Edward Bulwer-Lytton