Edward Bulwer-Lytton - Life Quotes

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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
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
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
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
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
Life, that ever needs forgiveness, has, for its first duty, to forgive.

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
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
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
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
How many of us have been incited to reason, have first learned to think, to draw conclusions, to extract a moral from the follies of life, by some dazzling aphorism.

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
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
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
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
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
Never, be argued out of your soul, never be argued out of your honor, and never be argued into believing that soul and honor do not run a terrible risk if you limp into life with the load of a debt on your shoulders.

Edward Bulwer-Lytton
A life of pleasure makes even the strongest mind frivolous at last.

Edward Bulwer-Lytton
To find what you seek in the road of life, the best proverb of all is that which says: Leave no stone unturned.

Edward Bulwer-Lytton
Man must be disappointed with the lesser things of life before he can comprehend the full value of the greater.

Edward Bulwer-Lytton