Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton
The same refinement which brings us new pleasures exposes us to new pains.Collection: Pain
Fate is not the ruler, but the servant of Providence.Collection: Fate
There is no past, as long as books shall live. Books make the past our heritage and our home.Collection: Book
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.Collection: Destiny
Love creates, love cements, love enters and harmonizes all things.Collection: Cement
What is human is immortal!Collection: Immortality
The vices and the virtues are written in a language the world cannot construe; it reads them in a vile translation, and the translators are Failure and Success.Collection: Vices
The faults of a brilliant writer are never dangerous on the long run; a thousand people read his work who would read no other; inquiry is directed to each of his doctrines; it is soon discovered what is sound and what is false; the sound become maxims, and the false beacons.Collection: Running
Fiction may be said to be the caricature of history.Collection: May
Ere yet we yearn for what is out of our reach, we are still in the cradle. When wearied out with our yearnings, desire again falls asleep; we are on the death-bed.Collection: Fall
Earnest men never think in vain, though their thoughts may be errors.Collection: Men
Vanity calculates but poorly on the vanity of others; what a virtue we should distil from frailty, what a world of pain we should save our brethren, if we would suffer our own weakness to be the measure of theirs.Collection: Pain
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.Collection: Clever
How little praise warms out of a man the good that is in him, as the sneer of contempt which he feels is unjust chill the ardor to excel.Collection: Men
The heart of a man's like that delicate weed, / Which requires to be trampled on, boldly indeed / Ere it gives forth the fragrance you wish to extract.Collection: Weed
Science is an ocean. It is as open to the cockboat as the frigate. One man carries across it a freightage of ingots, another may fish there for herrings.Collection: Ocean
The food of hope is meditative action.Collection: Action
Art is the effort of man to express the ideas which nature suggests to him of a power above nature, whether that power be within the recesses of his own being, or in the Great First Cause of which nature, like himself, is but the effect.Collection: Art
Love like Death,, Levels all ranks, and lays the shepherd's crook Beside the scepterCollection: Love
Our very wretchedness grows dear to us when suffering for one we love.Collection: Love