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.
Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron LyttonOut of the ashes of misanthropy benevolence rises again; we find many virtues where we had imagined all was vice, many acts of disinterested friendship where we had fancied all was calculation and fraud--and so gradually from the two extremes we pass to the proper medium; and, feeling that no human being is wholly good or wholly base, we learn that true knowledge of mankind which induces us to expect little and forgive much. The world cures alike the optimist and the misanthrope.
Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron LyttonIt is not by the gray of the hair that one knows the age of the heart.
Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron LyttonWhen a man is not amused, he feels an involuntary contempt for those who are.
Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton