Edward Bulwer-Lytton Quotes

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

Edward Bulwer-Lytton
They have written volumes out of which a couplet of verse, a period in prose, may cling to the rock of ages, as a shell that survives a deluge.

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
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
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
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
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
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
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
In how large a proportion of creatures is existence composed of one ruling passion, the most agonizing of all sensations--fear.

Edward Bulwer-Lytton
Life, that ever needs forgiveness, has, for its first duty, to forgive.

Edward Bulwer-Lytton
Death is the only monastery; the tomb is the only cell, and the grave that adjoins the convent is the bitterest mock of its futility.

Edward Bulwer-Lytton
Oratory, like the drama, abhors lengthiness; like the drama, it must keep doing. It avoids, as frigid, prolonged metaphysical soliloquy. Beauties themselves, if they delay or distract the effect which should be produced on the audience, become blemishes.

Edward Bulwer-Lytton
Rarest of all things on earth is the union in which both, by their contrasts, make harmonious their blending; each supplying the defects of the helpmate, and completing, by fusion, one strong human soul.

Edward Bulwer-Lytton
Punctuality is the stern virtue of men of business, and the graceful courtesy of princes.

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
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
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
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
The imagination acquires by custom a certain involuntary, unconscious power of observation and comparison, correcting its own mistakes, and arriving at precision of judgment, just as the outward eye is disciplined to compare, adjust, estimate, measure, the objects reflected on the back of its retina.

Edward Bulwer-Lytton
He who sees his heir in his own child, carries his eye over hopes and possessions lying far beyond his gravestone, viewing his life, even here, as a period but closed with a comma. He who sees his heir in another man's child sees the full stop at the end of the sentence.

Edward Bulwer-Lytton
We cannot of ourselves estimate the degree of our success in what we strive for.

Edward Bulwer-Lytton
Bright and illustrious illusions! Who can blame, who laugh at the boy, who not admire and commend him, for that desire of a fame outlasting the Pyramids by which he insensibly learns to live in a life beyond the present, and nourish dreams of a good unattainable by the senses?

Edward Bulwer-Lytton
The Management of money is, in much, the management of self. If heaven allotted to each man seven guardian angels, five of them, at least, would be found night and day hovering over his pockets.

Edward Bulwer-Lytton
Vanity, indeed, is the very antidote to conceit; for while the former makes us all nerve to the opinion of others, the latter is perfectly satisfied with its opinion of itself.

Edward Bulwer-Lytton