Top 100 Edward Bulwer Quotes
#1. There are two lives to each of us, the life of our actions, and the life of our minds and hearts. History reveals men's deeds and their outward characters, but not themselves. There is a secret self that has its own life, unpenetrated and unguessed.
Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton
#6. Emotion, whether of ridicule, anger, or sorrow,
whether raised at a puppet show, a funeral, or a battle,
is your grandest of levellers. The man who would be always superior should be always apathetic.
Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton
#8. Music, once admitted to the soul, becomes a sort of spirit, and never dies.
Edward Bulwer-Lytton
#9. Ere yet we yearn for what is out of our reach, we are still in the cradle. When wearied out with our yearnings, desire again falls asleep; we are on the death-bed.
Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton
#11. A sense of contentment makes us kindly and benevolent to others; we are not chafed and galled by cares which are tyrannical because original. We are fulfilling our proper destiny, and those around us feel the sunshine of our own hearts.
Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton
#12. Faith builds in the dungeon and lazarhouse its sublimest shrines; and up, through roofs of stone, that shut out the eye of heaven, ascends the ladder where the angels glide to and fro,
prayer.
Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton
#13. social infancy, regarded the legends of their faith as a child reads a fairy tale, credulous of all that is supernatural in the agency--unconscious of all that may be philosophical in the moral. It is true, indeed, that dim
Edward Bulwer-Lytton
#14. It is, the most beautiful truth in morals that we have no such thing as a distinct or divided interest from our race. In their welfare is ours, and by choosing the broadest paths to effect their happiness we choose the surest and the shortest to our own.
Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton
#17. The poet in prose or verse - the creator - can only stamp his images forcibly on the page in proportion as he has forcibly felt, ardently nursed, and long brooded over them.
Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton
#18. 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, 1st Baron Lytton
#19. A man is arrogant in proportion to his ignorance. Man's natural tendency is to egotism. Man, in his infancy of knowledge, thinks that all creation was formed for him.
Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton
#24. my Clodius, how little your countrymen know of the true versatility of a Pericles, of the true witcheries of an Aspasia!
Edward Bulwer-Lytton
#26. 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, 1st Baron Lytton
#27. Love is rarely a hypocrite; but hate
how detect and how guard against it! It lurks where you least expect it; it is created by causes that you can the least foresee; and civilization multiplies its varieties, whilst it favors its disguise.
Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton
#31. 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, 1st Baron Lytton
#32. 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 G. Bulwer-Lytton
#34. Truth makes on the ocean of nature no one track of light; every eye, looking on, finds its own.
Edward G. Bulwer-Lytton
#36. 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, 1st Baron Lytton
#43. 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, 1st Baron Lytton
#47. 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, 1st Baron Lytton
#50. We tell our triumphs to the crowds, but our own hearts are the sole confidants of our sorrows.
Edward G. Bulwer-Lytton
#55. The faults of a brilliant writer are never dangerous on the long run; a thousand people read his work who would read no other; inquiry is directed to each of his doctrines; it is soon discovered what is sound and what is false; the sound become maxims, and the false beacons.
Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton
#58. 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
#59. Alone!-that worn-out word, So idly spoken, and so coldly heard; Yet all that poets sing and grief hath known Of hopes laid waste, knells in that word ALONE!
Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton
#60. 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, 1st Baron Lytton
#61. 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, 1st Baron Lytton
#64. 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, 1st Baron Lytton
#65. There is no tongue that flatters like a lover's; and yet, in the exaggeration of his feelings, flattery seems to him commonplace. Strange and prodigal exuberance, which soon exhausts itself by flowing!
Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton
#69. Injustice, they say, can only emanate from three causes: want of wisdom to perceive what is just, want of benevolence to desire, want of power to fulfill it; and that each of these three wants is incompatible in the All-Wise, the All-Good, the All-Powerful.
Edward Bulwer-Lytton
#71. Happiness and virtue rest upon each other; the best are not only the happiest, but the happiest are usually the best.
Edward G. Bulwer-Lytton
#72. A pipe is the fountain of contemplation, the source of pleasure, the companion of the wise; and the man who smokes, thinks like a philosopher and acts like a Samaritan.
Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton
#74. 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, 1st Baron Lytton
#76. The commerce of intellect loves distant shores. The small retail dealer trades only with his neighbor; when the great merchant trades he links the four quarters of the globe.
Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton
#81. We are born for a higher destiny than that of earth; there is a realm where the rainbow never fades, where the stars will be spread before us like islands that slumber on the ocean, and where the beings that pass before us like shadows will stay in our presence forever.
Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton
#83. 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, 1st Baron Lytton
#90. We love the beautiful and serene, but we have a feeling as deep as love for the terrible and dark.
Edward Bulwer-Lytton
#93. 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, 1st Baron Lytton
#96. 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, 1st Baron Lytton
#100. What men want is not talent, it is purpose; in other words, not the power to achieve, but will to labor. I believe that labor judiciously and continuously applied becomes genius.
Edward Bulwer-Lytton
