Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton
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.Collection: Errors
Our ideas, like orange-plants, spread out in proportion to the size of the box which imprisons the roots.Collection: Inspirational
There are times when the mirth of others only saddens us, especially the mirth of children with high spirits, that jar on our own quiet mood.Collection: Children
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.Collection: Thinking
Patience is not passive; on the contrary, it is active; it is concentrated strength.Collection: Patience
Labour is the purgatory of the erring.Collection: Erring
The learned compute that seven hundred and seven millions of millions of vibrations have to penetrate the eye before the eye can distinguish the tints of a violet.Collection: Eye
In all cases of heart-ache, the application of another man's disappointment draws out the pain and allays the irritation.Collection: Letting Go
There is no man so friendless but that he can find a friend sincere enough to tell him disagreeable truths.Collection: Friendship
It is often the easiest move that completes the game.Collection: Moving
More is got from one book on which the thought settles for a definite end in knowledge, than from libraries skimmed over by a wandering eye.Collection: Book
Could we know by what strange circumstances a man's genius became prepared for practical success, we should discover that the most serviceable items in his education were never entered in the bills which his father paid for.Collection: Education
Fine natures are like fine poems; a glance at the first two lines suffices for a guess into the beauty that waits you if you read on.Collection: Character
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.Collection: Men
It is, the most beautiful truth in morals that we have no such thing as a distinct or divided interest from our race. In their welfare is ours, and by choosing the broadest paths to effect their happiness we choose the surest and the shortest to our own.Collection: Beautiful
Debt is to man what the serpent is to the bird; its eye fascinates, its breath poisons, its coil crushes sinew and bone, its jaw is the pitiless grave.Collection: Crush
Dandies, when first-rate, are generally very agreeable men.Collection: Men
Ask any school-boy up to the age of fifteen where he would spend his holidays. Not one in five hundred will say, "In the streets of London," if you give him the option of green fields and running waters. It is, then, a fair presumption that there must be something of the child still in the character of the men or the women whom the country charms in maturer as in dawning life.Collection: Running
Evening is the delight of virtuous age; it seems an emblem of the tranquil close of busy life--serene, placid, and mild, with the impress of its great Creator stamped upon it; it spreads its quiet wings over the grave, and seems to promise that all shall be peace beyond it.Collection: Wings
Bright and illustrious illusions! Who can blame, who laugh at the boy, who not admire and commend him, for that desire of a fame outlasting the Pyramids by which he insensibly learns to live in a life beyond the present, and nourish dreams of a good unattainable by the senses?Collection: Dream
What, after all, is heaven, but a transition from dim guesses and blind struggling with a mysterious and adverse fate to the fullness of all wisdom--from ignorance, in a word, to knowledge, but knowledge of what order?Collection: Struggle
Hobbies should be wives, not mistresses. It will not do to have more than one at a time. One hobby leads you out of extravagance; a team of hobbies you cannot drive till you are rich enough to find corn for them all. Few men are rich enough for that.Collection: Team
A life of pleasure makes even the strongest mind frivolous at last.Collection: Mind
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.Collection: Gratitude
A fiction which is designed to inculcate an object wholly alien to the imagination sins against the first law of art; and if a writer of fiction narrow his scope to particulars so positive as polemical controversy in matters ecclesiastical, political or moral, his work may or may not be an able treatise, but it must be a very poor novel.Collection: Art
The veil which covers the face of futurity is woven by the hand of mercy.Collection: Hands
More bounteous run rivers when the ice that locked their flow melts into their waters. And when fine natures relent, their kindness is swelled by the thaw.Collection: Forgiveness
When the world frowns, we can face it; but let it smile, and we are undone.Collection: World
Personal liberty is the paramount essential to human dignity and human happiness.Collection: Liberty
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.Collection: Father
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.Collection: Moving
There is no man so great as not to have some littleness more predominant than all his greatness. Our virtues are the dupes, and often only the plaything of our follies.Collection: Greatness
There is in the heart of woman such a deep well of love that no age can freeze it.Collection: Heart
Days are like years in the love of the young, when no bar, no obstacle, is between their hearts,--when the sun shines, and the course runs smooth--when their love is prosperous and confessed.Collection: Love
Nothing but real love--(how rare it is; has one human heart in a million ever known it?) nothing but real love can repay us for the loss of freedom--the cares and fears of poverty--the cold pity of the world that we both despise and respect.Collection: Love
We must remember how apt man is to extremes--rushing from credulity and weakness to suspicion and distrust.Collection: Men
Say what we will, you may be sure that ambition is an error; its wear and tear of heart are never recompensed, -it steals away the freshness of life, -it deadens its vivid and social enjoyments, -it shuts our souls to our own youth, -and we are old ere we remember that we have made a fever and a labor of our raciest years.Collection: Heart
A good cigar is as great a comfort to a man as a good cry to a woman.Collection: Funny
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.Collection: Wise
The Italians have voices like peacocks - German gives me a cold in the head - and Russian is nothing but sneezingCollection: Voice
There are two avenues from the little passions and the drear calamities of earth; both lead to the heaven and away from hell-Art and Science. But art is more godlike than science; science discovers, art creates.Collection: Art
Men of strong affections are jealous of their own genius. They fear lest they should be loved for a quality, and not for themselves.Collection: Jealousy
The affections are immortal! They are the sympathies which unite the ceaseless generations.Collection: Generations
Never, be argued out of your soul, never be argued out of your honor, and never be argued into believing that soul and honor do not run a terrible risk if you limp into life with the load of a debt on your shoulders.Collection: Running
Genius, the Pythian of the beautiful, leaves its large truths a riddle to the dull.Collection: Beautiful
The conscience is the most flexible material in the world. Today you cannot stretch it over a mole hill; while tomorrow it can hide a mountain.Collection: Mountain
The distinguishing trait of people accustomed to good society is a calm, imperturbable quiet which pervades all their actions and habits, from the greatest to the least. They eat in quiet, move in quiet, live in quiet, and lose their wife, or even their money, in quiet; while low persons cannot take up either a spoon or an affront without making such an amazing noise about it.Collection: Moving
Punctuality is a virtue, If you don't mind being lonely.Collection: Lonely
Alas! innocence is but a poor substitute for experience.Collection: Innocence