Edward Bulwer-Lytton - Man Quotes

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The true spirit of conversation consists in building on another man's observation, not overturning it.

Edward Bulwer-Lytton
A fool…flatters himself—a wise man flatters the fool.

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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
Science is not a club, it is an ocean; it is open to the cockboat as the frigate. One man carries across it a freightage of ingots, another may fish there for herrings. Who can exhaust the sea?

Edward Bulwer-Lytton
Toil to some is happiness, and rest to others. This man can only breathe in crowds, and that man only in solitudes.

Edward Bulwer-Lytton
The man who smokes, thinks like a sage and acts like a Samaritan.

Edward Bulwer-Lytton
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
In all cases of heart-ache, the application of another man's disappointment draws out the pain and allays the irritation.

Edward Bulwer-Lytton
There is no man so great as not to have some littleness more predominant than all his greatness. Our virtues are the dupes, and often only the plaything of our follies.

Edward Bulwer-Lytton
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
Talk not of genius baffled. Genius is master of man. Genius does what it must, and Talent does what it can.

Edward Bulwer-Lytton
Every man who observes vigilantly, and resolves steadfastly, grows unconsciously into genius.

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
Every street has two sides, the shady side and the sunny. When two men shake hands and part, mark which of the two takes the sunny side; he will be the younger man of the two.

Edward Bulwer-Lytton
Of all the virtues necessary to the completion of the perfect man, there is none to be more delicately implied and less ostentatiously vaunted than that of exquisite feeling or universal benevolence.

Edward Bulwer-Lytton
To judge human character rightly, a man may sometimes have very small experience, provided he has a very large heart.

Edward Bulwer-Lytton
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
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
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