In beginning the world, if you don't wish to get chafed at every turn, fold up your pride carefully, put it under lock and key, and only let it out to air upon grand occasions. Pride is a garment all stiff brocade outside, all grating sackcloth on the side next to the skin.
Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron LyttonThe conscience is the most flexible material in the world. Today you cannot stretch it over a mole hill; while tomorrow it can hide a mountain.
Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron LyttonLove 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 LyttonAsk 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, 1st Baron LyttonThe man who wants his wedding garments to suit him must allow plenty of time for the measure.
Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron LyttonThe 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, 1st Baron Lytton