Edward Bulwer-Lytton Quotes
Childhood and genius have the same master organ in common - inquisitiveness.
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.
It is an error to suppose that courage means courage in everything. Most people are brave only in the dangers to which they accustom themselves, either in imagination or practice.
Only by the candle, held in the skeleton hand of Poverty, can man read his own dark heart.
In every civilized society there is found a race of men who retain the instincts of the aboriginal cannibal and live upon their fellow-men as a natural food.
We must remember how apt man is to extremes--rushing from credulity and weakness to suspicion and distrust.
Genius, the Pythian of the beautiful, leaves its large truths a riddle to the dull.
The higher the rank the less pretence, because there is less to pretend to.
At court one becomes a sort of human ant eater, and learns to catch one's prey by one's tongue.
It is only in some corner of the brain which we leave empty that Vice can obtain a lodging. When she knocks at your door be able to say: "No room for your ladyship; pass on.
Ah, what without a heaven would be even love!--a perpetual terror of the separation that must one day come.
Nothing so good as a university education, nor worse than a university without its education.
In science, address the few, in literature the many. In science, the few must dictate opinion to the many; in literature, the many, sooner or later, force their judgement on the few.
You know There are moments when silence, prolonged and unbroken, More expressive may be than all words ever spoken.
Better than fame is still the wish for fame, the constant training for a glorious strife.
Centuries roll, customs change, but, ever since the time of the earliest mother, woman yearns to be the soother.
A woman too often reasons from her heart; hence two-thirds of her mistakes and her troubles.
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.
Every man loves and admires his own country because it produced him.
Talk not of genius baffled. Genius is master of man. Genius does what it must, and Talent does what it can.
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.
It is the glorious doom of literature that the evil perishes and the good remains.
In life, as in whist, hope nothing from the way cards may be dealt to you. Play the cards, whatever they be, to the best of your skill.
Every street has two sides, the shady side and the sunny. When two men shake hands and part, mark which of the two takes the sunny side; he will be the younger man of the two.
It is an error to suppose that courage means courage in everything.
Leave glory to great folks. Ah, castles in the air cost a vast deal to keep up!
Not in the knowledge of things without, but in the perfection of the soul within, lies the empire of man aspiring to be more than man.
The brave man wants no charms to encourage him to his duty, and the good man scorns all warnings that would deter him from fulfilling it.
To the thinker, the most trifling external object often suggests ideas, which, like Homer's chain, extend, link after link, from earth to heaven.
He whom God hath gifted with a love of retirement possesses, as it were, an extra sense.
Wrap thyself in the decent veil that the arts or the graces weave for thee, O human nature! It is only the statue of marble whose nakedness the eye can behold without shame and offence!
There is an ill-breeding to which, whatever our rank and nature, we are almost equally sensitive, the ill-breeding that comes from want of consideration for others.
He who seeks repentance for the past, should woo the angel virtue for the future.
To judge human character rightly, a man may sometimes have very small experience, provided he has a very large heart.