Edward George Earle Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton (1803–73) was a British novelist, poet, and politician. Judged by his contemporaries a rival to Charles Dickens, this popular and productive novelist frequently broke new ground for the novel.
Born in London Bulwer-Lytton is most famous as the author of lengthy novels such as Falkland (1827,) Pelham: or The Adventures of a Gentleman (1828,) Eugene Aram (1832,) The Last Days of Pompeii (1834,) and Harold, the Last of the Saxon Kings (1848.) These novels won him immediate success and made him an affluent man.
Bulwer-Lytton entered Parliament representing St. Ives, Huntingdonshire, first as a Whig MP 1831–41 and, under the influence of Benjamin Disraeli, a Conservative MP 1851–66. He served as Secretary of State for the Colonies 1858–59, and was one of the founders of British Columbia. Even while he stayed an active politician, he found time to produce many novels, plays, and poems.
Bulwer-Lytton coined the catchphrases “the great unwashed,” “pursuit of the almighty dollar,” “the pen is mightier than the sword,” and “dweller on the threshold.” His novel Paul Clifford (1830) opens with one of the most well-known opening lines in all of English literature: “It was a dark and stormy night….”
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To judge human character rightly, a man may sometimes have very small experience, provided he has a very large heart.
—Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton
Topics: Character, Poverty
Talent does what it can; genius does what it must.
—Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton
Topics: War, Genius, Talent
Anger ventilated often hurries towards forgiveness; anger concealed often hardens into revenge.
—Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton
Topics: Anger
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
Money never can be well managed if sought solely through the greed of money for its own sake. In all meanness there is a defect of intellect as well as of heart. And even the cleverness of avarice is but the cunning of imbecility.
—Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton
The past but lives in written words: a thousand ages were blank if books had not evoked their ghosts, and kept the pale unbodied shades to warn us from fleshless lips.
—Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton
Topics: The Past, Books, Past
Nothing ages like laziness.
—Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton
To be happy you must forget yourself. — Learn benevolence; it is the only cure of a morbid temper.
—Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton
Topics: Happiness
A woman too often reasons from her heart; hence two-thirds of her mistakes and her troubles.
—Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton
What men want is not talent, it is purpose; in other words, not the power to achieve, but will to labor. I believe that labor judiciously and continuously applied becomes genius.
—Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton
Topics: Purpose, One liners, Talent
Happy is the man who hath never known what it is to taste of fame—to have it is a purgatory, to want it is a Hell.
—Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton
The truest eloquence is that which holds us too mute for applause.
—Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton
Art and science have their meeting point in method.
—Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton
Topics: Science
Remorse is the echo of a lost virtue.
—Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton
There is one name which I can never utter without a reverence due to the religion which binds earth to heaven — a name cheered, beautified, exalted and hallowed — and that is the name of wife.
—Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton
That one vast thought of God which we call the world.
—Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton
Topics: World
Fate! there is no fate. — Between the thought and the success God is the only agent.
—Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton
Topics: Fate
The best teacher is the one who suggests rather than dogmatizes, and inspires his listener with the wish to teach himself.
—Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton
Topics: Education, Teaching
In spite of all wanderings, happiness is always found within a narrow compass and among objects which lie within our immediate reach.
—Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton
Nothing is so contagious as enthusiasm. — It is the real allegory of the tale of Orpheus; it moves stones, and charms brutes. — It is the genius of sincerity, and truth accomplishes no victories without it.
—Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton
Topics: Enthusiasm, Genius
Youth is in danger until it learns to look upon debts as furies.
—Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton
Topics: Youth, Debt
On the imagination God sometimes paints, by dream and symbol, the likeness of things to come. — What the foolish-wise call fanaticism, belongs to the same part of us as hope. — Each is the yearning of the soul for the great “Beyond,” which attests our immortality.
—Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton
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
I would rather have five energetic and competent enemies than one fool friend.
—Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton
Of all the signs of a corrupt heart and a feeble head, the tendency of incredulity is the surest. — Real philosophy seeks rather to solve than to deny.
—Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton
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: Genius, Children
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