Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton Quotes

Art itself is essentially ethical; because every true work of art must have a beauty or grandeur of some kind, and beauty and grandeur cannot be comprehended by the beholder except through the moral sentiment. The eye is only a witness; it is not a judge. The mind judges what the eye reports to it; therefore, whatever elevates the moral sentiment to the contemplation of beauty and grandeur is in itself ethical.

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.

Reading without purpose is sauntering not exercise.

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.

Sooner mayest thou trust thy pocket to a pickpocket than give loyal friendship to the man who boasts of eyes to the heart never mounts in dew! Only when man weeps he should be alone, not because tears are weak, but they should be secret. Tears are akin to prayer,--Pharisees parade prayers, imposters parade tears.

Men never forgive those in whom there is nothing to pardon.

Punctuality is the stern virtue of men of business, and the graceful courtesy of princes.

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

It is an error to suppose that courage means courage in everything. Most people are brave only in the dangers to which they accustom themselves, either in imagination or practice.

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.

A mind once cultivated will not lie fallow for half an hour.

Whenever man commits a crime heaven finds a witness.

In solitude the passions feed upon the heart.

The grave is, I suspect, the sole commonwealth which attains that dead flat of social equality that life in its every principle so heartily abhors.

Every man loves and admires his own country because it produced him.

Poverty has strange bedfellows.

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

Master books, but do not let them master you.

I would rather have five energetic and competent enemies than one fool friend.

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

A man who cannot win fame in big own age will have a very small chance of winning it from posterity. True, there are some half-dozen exceptions to this truth among millions of myriads that attest it; but what man of common sense would invest any large amount of hope in so unpromising a lottery?

Youth, with swift feet, walks onward in the way; the land of joy lies all before his eyes.

The Italians have voices like peacocks - German gives me a cold in the head - and Russian is nothing but sneezing

Writers are the main landmarks of the past.

Fate laughs at probabilities.

The prudent person may direct a state, but it is the enthusiast who regenerates or ruins it

Fine natures are like fine poems; a glance at the first two lines suffices for a guess into the beauty that waits you if you read on.

Leave glory to great folks. Ah, castles in the air cost a vast deal to keep up!

In these days half our diseases come from neglect of the body in overwork of the brain.

We cannot of ourselves estimate the degree of our success in what we strive for.

The bold sympathize with the bold; and in great hearts, there is always a certain friendship for a gallant foe.

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.

One of the sublimest things in the world is plain truth.

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.

Bu is a word that cools many a warm impulse, stifles many a kindly thought, puts a dead stop to many a brotherly deed. No one would ever love his neighbor as himself if he listened to all the Buts that could be said.

When you borrow on your character, it is your character that you leave in pawn.

When some one sorrow, that is yet reparable, gets hold of your mind like a monomania,--when you think, because Heaven has denied you this or that, on which you had set your heart, that all your life must be a blank,--oh, then diet yourself well on biography,--the biography of good and great men. See how little a space one sorrow really makes in life. See scarce a page, perhaps, given to some grief similar to your own, and how triumphantly the life sails on beyond it.

Beautiful eyes in the face of a handsome woman are like eloquence to speech.

Let youth cherish sleep, the happiest of earthly boons, while yet it is at its command; for there cometh the day to all when "neither the voice of the lute nor the birds" shall bring back the sweet slumbers that fell on their young eyes as unbidden as the dews.

There are times when the mirth of others only saddens us, especially the mirth of children with high spirits, that jar on our own quiet mood.

Kindness like light speaks in the air it gilds.

A man is already of consequence in the world when it is known that we can implicitly rely upon him. Often I have known a man to be preferred in stations of honor and profit because he had this reputation: When he said he knew a thing, he knew it, and when he said he would do a thing, he did it.

Business first, then pleasure.

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.

Despair makes victims sometimes victors.

He who doth not smoke hath either known no great griefs, or refuseth himself the softest consolation, next to that which comes from heaven.

Youth is in danger until it learns to look upon debts as furies.

What, after all, is heaven, but a transition from dim guesses and blind struggling with a mysterious and adverse fate to the fullness of all wisdom--from ignorance, in a word, to knowledge, but knowledge of what order?