What is past is past, there is a future left to all men, who have the virtue to repent and the energy to atone.
Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron LyttonNothing but real love--(how rare it is; has one human heart in a million ever known it?) nothing but real love can repay us for the loss of freedom--the cares and fears of poverty--the cold pity of the world that we both despise and respect.
Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron LyttonO woman! woman! thou shouldest have few sins of thine own to answer for! Thou art the author of such a book of follies in a man that it would need the tears of all the angels to blot the record out.
Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron LyttonIt is the glorious doom of literature that the evil perishes and the good remains. Even when the original author of some healthy and useful truth is forgotten, the truth survives, transplanted to works more calculated to purify it from error, and perpetuate it to our benefit.
Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron LyttonA 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, 1st Baron LyttonWe may observe in humorous authors that the faults they chiefly ridicule have often a likeness in themselves. Cervantes had much of the knight-errant in him; Sir George Etherege was unconsciously the Fopling Flutter of his own satire; Goldsmith was the same hero to chambermaids, and coward to ladies that he has immortalized in his charming comedy; and the antiquarian frivolities of Jonathan Oldbuck had their resemblance in Jonathan Oldbuck's creator.
Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton