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.
—Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton
Topics: Kindness
Law is never wise but when merciful, out mercy has conditions; and that which is mercy to the myriads, may seem hard to the one; and that which seems hard to the one, may be mercy when viewed by the eye that looks on through eternity.
—Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton
Topics: Law
Nine times out of ten it is over the Bridge of Sighs that we pass the narrow gulf from youth to manhood. That interval is usually marked by an ill placed or disappointed affection. We recover and we find ourselves a new being. The intellect has become hardened by the fire through which it has passed. The mind profits by the wrecks of every passion, and we may measure our road to wisdom by the sorrows we have undergone.
—Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton
Topics: Mind, The Mind, Wisdom, Sorrow
The prudent person may direct a state, but it is the enthusiast who regenerates or ruins it.
—Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton
Topics: Enthusiasm
In the history of the passions each human heart is a world in itself; its experience can profit no others.
—Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton
Topics: Passion
Man must be disappointed with the lesser things of life before he can comprehend the full value of the greater.
—Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton
Topics: Disappointment
Know thyself, said the old philosophy.—“Improve thyself,” saith the new.—Our great object in time is not to waste our passions and gifts on the things external that we must leave behind, but that we cultivate within us all that we can carry into the eternal progress beyond.
—Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton
Topics: Self-improvement
Nothing can constitute good breeding which has not good nature for its foundation.
—Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton
A mind once cultivated will not lie fallow for half an hour.
—Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton
Topics: Mind
It is the excess and not the nature of our passions which is perishable. Like the trees which grow by the tomb of Protesilaus, the passions flourish till they reach a certain height, but no sooner is that height attained than they wither away.
—Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton
Topics: Passion
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.
—Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton
Not the marriage of convenience, nor the marriage of reason, but the marriage of love.—All other marriage, with vows so solemn, with intimacy so close, is but acted falsehood and varnished sin.
—Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton
Topics: Marriage
There is no tongue that flatters like a lover’s; and yet in the exaggeration of his feelings, flattery seems to him commonplace.
—Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton
Topics: Flattery
A life of pleasure makes even the strongest mind frivolous at last.
—Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton
Topics: Pleasure
I would rather have five energetic and competent enemies than one fool friend.
—Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton
Strike from mankind the principle of faith, and men would have no more history than a flock of sheep.
—Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton
Topics: Faith, Belief
Nothing conveys a more inaccurate idea of a whole truth than a part of a truth so prominently brought forth as to throw the other parts into shadow.—This is the art of caricature, by the happy use of which you might caricature the Apollo Belvidere.
—Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton
While the world lasts, the sun will gild the mountain-tops before it shines upon the plain.
—Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton
Few of either sex are ever united to their first love.—Yet married people jog on and call each other “My dear” and “My darling,” all the same.
—Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton
Topics: Marriage
Real philosophy seeks rather to solve than to deny. While we hear, every day, the small pretenders to science talk of the absurdities of alchemy, and the dream of the Philosopher’s Stone, a more erudite knowledge is aware that by alchemists the greatest discoveries in science have been made, and much which still seems abstruse, had we the key to the mystic phraseology they were compelled to adopt, might open the way to yet more noble acquisitions.
—Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton
Topics: Philosophy
Nothing short of an eternity could enable men to imagine, think, and feel, and to express all they have imagined, thought and felt.—Immortality, which is the spiritual desire, is the intellectual necessity.
—Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton
Topics: Immortality
A good man does good merely by living.
—Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton
Topics: Influence
Fate is not the ruler, but the servant of Providence.
—Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton
Topics: Fate
Earnest men never think in vain though their thoughts may be errors.
—Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton
Topics: Thought
Childhood and genius have the same master-organ in common—inquisitiveness.—Let childhood have its way, and as it began where genius begins, it may find what genius finds.
—Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton
Topics: Curiosity, Children, Genius
To be happy, you must learn to forget yourself.
—Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton
Topics: Happiness
A chord, stronger or weaker, is snapped asunder in every parting, and time’s busy fingers are not practised in re-splicing broken ties. Meet again you may; will it be in the same way? with the same sympathies? with the same sentiments? Will the souls, hurrying on in diverse paths, unite once more, as if the interval had been a dream? Rarely, rarely!
—Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton
Talkers will refrain from evil speaking when listeners refrain from evil hearing.
—Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton
Topics: Slander
Take away the sword; states can be saved without it; bring the pen!
—Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton
In life, as in art, the beautiful moves in curves.
—Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton
Topics: Beauty
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- Benjamin Disraeli British Head of State
- Sir Thomas Buxton, 1st Baronet English Politician
- J. B. Priestley British Novelist, Playwright, Essayist
- William Congreve English Dramatist
- John Dryden English Poet
- John Gay English Poet, Dramatist
- Robert Browning English Poet
- Augustine Birrell English Politician, Essayist
- Colley Cibber English Playwright
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