Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton Quotes

It 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.

There are two lives to each of us, the life of our actions, and the life of our minds and hearts. History reveals men's deeds and their outward characters, but not themselves. There is a secret self that has its own life, unpenetrated and unguessed.

Fate! There is no fate. Between the thought and the success God is the only agent. Fate is not the ruler, but the servant of Providence.

Husband and wife have so many interests in common that when they have jogged through the ups and downs of life a sufficient time, the leash which at first galled often grows easy and familiar.

The curse of the great is ennui.

The worst part of an eminent man's conversation is, nine times out of ten, to be found in that part by which he means to be clever.

The secret of fashion is to surprise and never to disappoint.

There is no society, however free and democratic, where wealth will not create an aristocracy.

Rarest of all things on earth is the union in which both, by their contrasts, make harmonious their blending; each supplying the defects of the helpmate, and completing, by fusion, one strong human soul.

In life, as in art, the beautiful moves in curves.

A man is arrogant in proportion to his ignorance. Man's natural tendency is to egotism. Man, in his infancy of knowledge, thinks that all creation was formed for him.

We are not such fools as to pay for reading inferior books, when we can read superior books for nothing.

The most delicate beauty in the mind of women is, and ever must be, an independence of artificial stimulants for content. It is not so with men. The links that bind men to capitals belong to the golden chain of civilization,--the chain which fastens all our destinies to the throne of Jove. And hence the larger proportion of men in whom genius is pre-eminent have preferred to live in cities, though some of them have bequeathed to us the loveliest pictures of the rural scenes in which they declined to dwell.

The law is a gun, which if it misses a pigeon always kills a crow; if it does not strike the guilty, it hits someone else. As every crime creates a law, so in turn every law creates a crime.

Each man forms his duty according to his predominant characteristic; the stern require an avenging judge; the gentle, a forgiving father. Just so the pygmies declared that Jove himself was a pygmy.

A reform is a correction of abuses; a revolution is a transfer of power.

Invention is nothing more than a fine deviation from, or enlargement on a fine model . . .

What mankind wants is not talent; it is purpose.

It is the misfortune of all miscellaneous political combinations, that with the purest motives of their more generous members are ever mixed the most sordid interests and the fiercest passions of mean confedes.

Dream manfully and nobly, and thy dreams shall be prophets.

The man who has acquired the habit of study, though for only one hour every day in the year, and keeps to the one thing studied till it is mastered, will be startled to see the way he has made at the end of a twelvemonth.

Happiness and virtue rest upon each other; the best are not only the happiest, but the happiest are usually the best.

Emotion, whether of ridicule, anger, or sorrow,--whether raised at a puppet show, a funeral, or a battle,--is your grandest of levellers. The man who would be always superior should be always apathetic.

The strong and virtuous admit no destiny.

Dandies, when first-rate, are generally very agreeable men.

Certain I am that every author who has written a book with earnest forethought and fondly cherished designs will bear testimony to the fact that much which he meant to convey has never been guessed at in any review of his work; and many a delicate beauty of thought, on which he principally valued himself, remains, like the statue of Isis, an image of truth from which no hand lifts the veil.

Men are valued, not for what they are, but for what they seem to be.

People praise us behind our backs, but we hear them not; few before our faces, and who is not suspicious of the truth of such praise?

I was always an early riser. Happy the man who is! Every morning day comes to him with a virgin's love, full of bloom and freshness. The youth of nature is contagious, like the gladness of a happy child.

Revenge is a common passion; it is the sin of the uninstructed.

All doubt is cowardice - all trust is brave.

To how many is the death of the beloved the parent of faith!

In some exquisite critical hints on "Eurythmy," Goethe remarks, "that the best composition in pictures is that which, observing the most delicate laws of harmony, so arranges the objects that they by their position tell their own story." And the rule thus applied to composition in painting applies no less to composition in literature.

Political freedom is, or ought to be, the best guaranty for the safety and continuance of spiritual, mental, and civil freedom. It is the combination of numbers to secure the liberty to each one.

Anger ventilated often hurries towards forgiveness; anger concealed often hardens into revenge.

Success never needs an excuse.

Women love energy and grand results.

The affections are immortal! They are the sympathies which unite the ceaseless generations.

There's no weapon that slays its victim so surely (if well aimed) as praise.

In belief lies the secret of all valuable exertion.

There is no such thing as luck. It's a fancy name for being always at our duty, and so sure to be ready when good time comes.

What ever our wandering our happiness will always be found within a narrow compass, and in the middle of the objects more immediately within our reach.

Patience is a good palfrey, and will carry us a long day.

It is an error to suppose that courage means courage in everything.

We are born for a higher destiny than that of earth; there is a realm where the rainbow never fades, where the stars will be spread before us like islands that slumber on the ocean, and where the beings that pass before us like shadows will stay in our presence forever.

A fresh mind keeps the body fresh.

It is often the easiest move that completes the game. Fortune is like the lady whom a lover carried off from all his rivals by putting an additional lace upon his liveries.

Philosophy, while it soothes the reason, damps the ambition.