Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton Quotes

The Almighty proves his existence by creating.

Revolutions are not made with rosewater.

Real philosophy seeks rather to solve than to deny.

That man will never be a perfect gentleman who lives only with gentlemen. To be a man of the world we must view that world in every grade and in every perspective.

Tears are akin to prayer - Pharisees parade prayers, imposters parade tears.

Power is so characteristically calm, that calmness in itself has the aspect of strength.

The desire of excellence is the necessary attribute of those who excel. We work little for a thing unless we wish for it.

Happy is the man who hath never known what it is to taste of fame - to have it is a purgatory, to want it is a hell.

When you talk to the half-wise, twaddle; when you talk to the ignorant, brag; when you talk to the sagacious, look very humble and ask their opinion.

The more the merely human part of the poet remains a mystery, the more willing is the reverence given to his divine mission.

The first essential to success in the art you practice is respect for the art itself.

Honest men are the gentlemen of nature.

Our very wretchedness grows dear to us when suffering for one we love.

The Management of money is, in much, the management of self. If heaven allotted to each man seven guardian angels, five of them, at least, would be found night and day hovering over his pockets.

The fewer blows, the better. Brave men fight if they must; wise men never fight if they can help it.

It is a very high mind to which gratitude is not a painful sensation. If you wish to please, you will find it wiser to receive, solicit even, favors, than accord them; for the vanity of the obligor is always flattered, that of the obligee rarely.

As it has been finely expressed, "Principle is a passion for truth." And as an earlier and homelier writer hath it, "The truths we believe in are the pillars of our world.

A man's ancestry is a positive property to him.

When the world frowns, we can face it; but let it smile, and we are undone.

My father died shortly after I was twenty-one; and being left well off, and having a taste for travel and adventure, I resigned, for a time, all pursuit of the almighty dollar, and became a desultory wanderer over the face of the earth.

The mate for beauty should be a man and not a money chest.

A good heart is better than all the heads in the world.

At court one becomes a sort of human ant eater, and learns to catch one's prey by one's tongue.

Ambition has no rest.

Julius Caesar owed two millions when he risked the experiment of being general in Gaul. If Julius Caesar had not lived to cross the Rubicon, and pay off his debts, what would his creditors have called Julius Caesar?

To dispense with ceremony is the most delicate mode of conferring a compliment.

Of all the conditions to which the heart is subject suspense is one that most gnaws and cankers into the frame. One little month of that suspense, when it involves death, we are told by an eye witness in "Wakefield on the Punishment of Death," is sufficient to plough fixed lines and furrows in a convict of five and twenty,--sufficient, to dash the brown hair with grey, and to bleach the grey to white.

He that fancies himself very enlightened, because he sees the deficiencies of others, may be very ignorant, because he has not studied his own.

It is destiny phrase of the weak human heart! 'It is destiny' dark apology for every error! The strong and virtuous admit no destiny

A friend who stands with you in pressure is more valuable than a hundred ones who stand with you in pleasure.

He who esteems trifles for themselves is a trifler; he who esteems them for the conclusions to be drawn from them, or the advantage to which they can be put, is a philosopher.

In science, read, by preference, the newest works; in literature the oldest.

Fiction may be said to be the caricature of history.

What is past is past, there is a future left to all men, who have the virtue to repent and the energy to atone.

Out 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.

There is but one philosophy and its name is fortitude! To bear is to conquer our fate.

Genius has no brother.

The frenzy of nations is the statesmanship of fate.

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.

Alas! innocence is but a poor substitute for experience.

A woman too often reasons from her heart; hence two-thirds of her mistakes and her troubles.

It is the glorious doom of literature that the evil perishes and the good remains.

A fool flatters himself, a wise man flatters the fool.

If aught be worse than failure from overstress of a life's prime purpose, it is to sit down content with a little success.

Of all the virtues necessary to the completion of the perfect man, there is none to be more delicately implied and less ostentatiously vaunted than that of exquisite feeling or universal benevolence.

The 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.

Poverty is relative, and, therefor not ignoble.

Give, and you may keep your friend it you lose your money; lend, and the chances are that you lose your friend if ever you get back your money.