Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton
Genius is but fine observation strengthened by fixity of purpose.Collection: Purpose
Women love energy and grand results.Collection: Energy
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.Collection: Lying
It is a wonderful advantage to a man, in every pursuite or avocation, to secure an adviser in a sensible woman. In woman there is at once a subtle delicacy of tact, and a plain soundness of judgement, which are rarely combined to an equal degree in man. A woman, if she be really your friend, will have a sensitive regard for your character, honor, repute. She will seldom counsel you to do a shabby thing: for a woman friend always desires to be proud of you.Collection: Friendship
A woman is seldom merciful to the man who is timid.Collection: Men
Remedy your deficiencies, and your merits will take care of themselves. Every man has in him good and evil. His good is his valiant army, his evil is his corrupt commissariat; reform the commissariat and the army will do its duty.Collection: Character
Writers are the main landmarks of the past.Collection: Writing
Master books, but do not let them master you.Collection: Patience
He whom God hath gifted with a love of retirement possesses, as it were, an extra sense.Collection: Retirement
Childhood and genius have the same master organ in common - inquisitiveness.Collection: Children
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?Collection: People
The desire of excellence is the necessary attribute of those who excel. We work little for a thing unless we wish for it.Collection: Excellence
Some have the temperament and tastes of genius, without its creative power. They feel acutely, but express tamely.Collection: Creative
Toil to some is happiness, and rest to others. This man can only breathe in crowds, and that man only in solitudes.Collection: Work
A fresh mind keeps the body fresh. Take in the ideas of the day, drain off those of yesterday.Collection: Ideas
If you are in doubt whether to write a letter or not, don't. And the advice applies to many doubts in life besides that of letter writing.Collection: Writing
Ambition has no rest.Collection: Ambition
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.Collection: Men
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.Collection: Money
Whenever man commits a crime heaven finds a witness.Collection: Men
There is but one philosophy and its name is fortitude! To bear is to conquer our fate.Collection: Inspirational
Curse away! And let me tell thee, Beausant, a wise proverb The Arabs have,-"Curses are like young chickens, And still come home to roost."Collection: Wise
Castles in the air cost a vast deal to keep up.Collection: Air
We are not such fools as to pay for reading inferior books, when we can read superior books for nothing.Collection: Reading
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.Collection: Intelligence
Laws die, books never.Collection: Book
Nothing so good as a university education, nor worse than a university without its education.Collection: Education
In belief lies the secret of all valuable exertion.Collection: Lying
The bold sympathize with the bold; and in great hearts, there is always a certain friendship for a gallant foe.Collection: Heart
Nature never gives to a living thing capacities not particularly meant for its benefit and use. If Nature gives to us capacities to believe that we have a Creator whom we never saw, of whom we have no direct proof, who is kind and good and tender beyond all that we know of kindness and goodness and tenderness on earth, it is because the endowment of capacities to conceive a Being must be for our benefit and use; it would not be for our benefit and use if it were a lie.Collection: Kindness
Business dispatched is business well done, but business hurried is business ill done.Collection: Business
Love is a very contradiction of all the elements of our ordinary nature -- it makes the proud man meek -- the cheerful, sad -- the high-spirited, tame; our strongest resolutions, our hardiest energy fail before it. Believe me, you cannot prophesy of its future effect in a man from any knowledge of his past character.Collection: Believe
Love sacrifices all things to bless the thing it loves.Collection: Love
Art employs method for the symmetrical formation of beauty, as science employs it for the logical exposition of truth; but the mechanical process is, in the last, ever kept visibly distinct, while in the first it escapes from sight amid the shows of color and the curves of grace.Collection: Beauty
The real truthfulness of all works of imagination, sculpture, painting, and written fiction, is so purely in the imagination, that the artist never seeks to represent positive truth, but the idealized image of a truthCollection: Real
They have written volumes out of which a couplet of verse, a period in prose, may cling to the rock of ages, as a shell that survives a deluge.Collection: Rocks
Youth, with swift feet, walks onward in the way; the land of joy lies all before his eyes.Collection: Time
Grief alone can teach us what is man.Collection: Grief
In solitude the passions feed upon the heart.Collection: Passion
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.Collection: Father
There is one form of hope which is never unwise, and which certainly does not diminish with the increase of knowledge. In that form it changes its name, and we call it patience.Collection: Patience
Character is money; and according as the man earns or spends the money, money in turn becomes character. As money is the most evident power in the world's uses, so the use that he makes of money is often all that the world knows about a man.Collection: Money
He who sees his heir in his own child, carries his eye over hopes and possessions lying far beyond his gravestone, viewing his life, even here, as a period but closed with a comma. He who sees his heir in another man's child sees the full stop at the end of the sentence.Collection: Children
The curse of the great is ennui.Collection: Curse
Emulation, even in brutes, is sensitively "nervous." See the tremor of the thoroughbred racer before he starts. The dray-horse does not tremble, but he does not emulate. It is not his work to run a race. Says Marcus Antoninus, "It is all one to a stone whether it be thrown upward or downward." Yet the emulation of a man of genius is seldom with his contemporaries, that is, inwardly in his mind, although outwardly in his act it would seem so. The competitors with whom his secret ambition seems to vie are the dead.Collection: Running
Whatever you lend let it be your money, and not your name. Money you may get again, and, if not, you may contrive to do without it; name once lost you cannot get again.Collection: Character
Bu is a word that cools many a warm impulse, stifles many a kindly thought, puts a dead stop to many a brotherly deed. No one would ever love his neighbor as himself if he listened to all the Buts that could be said.Collection: Love
What a mistake to suppose that the passions are strongest in youth! The passions are not stronger, but the control over them is weaker! They are more easily excited, they are more violent and apparent; but they have less energy, less durability, less intense and concentrated power than in maturer life.Collection: Mistake
To mourn deeply for the death of another loosens from myself the petty desire for, and the animal adherence to life. We have gained the end of the philosopher, and view without shrinking the coffin and the pall.Collection: Death
A man's own conscience is his sole tribunal, and he should care no more for that phantom "opinion" than he should fear meeting a ghost if he crossed the churchyard at dark.Collection: Dark