Edward Bulwer Quotes & Sayings

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. — Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton

Punctuality is a virtue, If you don't mind being lonely. — Edward Bulwer-Lytton

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. — Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton

A reform is a correction of abuses; a revolution is a transfer of power. — Edward G. Bulwer-Lytton

It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents, except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness. — Edward Bulwer-Lytton

Dandies, when first-rate, are generally very agreeable men. — Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton

He who writes prose builds his temple to Fame in rubble; he who writes verses builds it in granite. — Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton

What's money without happiness? — Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton

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. — Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton

Beside one deed of guilt, how blest is guiltless woe! — Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton

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. — Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton

The poet in prose or verse - the creator - can only stamp his images forcibly on the page in proportion as he has forcibly felt, ardently nursed, and long brooded over them. — Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton

I believe that there is much less difference between the author and his works than is currently supposed; it is usually in the physical appearance of the writer,
his manners, his mien, his exterior,
that he falls short of the ideal a reasonable man forms of him
rarely in his mind. — Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton

Time, O my friend, is money! Time wasted can never conduce to money well managed. — Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton

It is the glorious doom of literature that the evil perishes and the good remains. — Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton

Self-confidence is not hope; it is the self-judgment of your own internal forces in their relation to the world without, which results from the failure of many hopes and the non-realization of many fears. — Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton

Every man of sound brain whom you meet knows something worth knowing better than yourself. A man, on the whole, is a better preceptor than a book. But what scholar does not allow that the dullest book can suggest to him a new and a sound idea? — Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton

Love thou, and if thy love be deep as mine,
Thou wilt not laugh at poets. — Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton

The magic of the tongue is the most dangerous of all spells. — Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton

In every civilized society there is found a race of men who retain the instincts of the aboriginal cannibal and live upon their fellow-men as a natural food. — Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton

Though no participator in the joy of more vehement sport, I have a pleasure that I cannot reconcile to my abstract notions of the tenderness due to dumb creatures in the tranquil cruelty of angling. I can only palliate the wanton destructiveness of my amusement by trying to assure myself that my pleasure does not spring from the success of the treachery I practise toward a poor little fish, but rather from that innocent revelry in the luxuriance of summer life which only anglers enjoy to the utmost. — Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton

Chance happens to all, but to turn chance to account is the gift of few. — Edward G. Bulwer-Lytton

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. — Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton

In these days half our diseases come from neglect of the body in overwork of the brain. — Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton

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. — Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton

A life of pleasure makes even the strongest mind frivolous at last. — Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton

O woman! woman! thou shouldest have few sins of thine own to answer for! Thou art the author of such a book of follies in a man that it would need the tears of all the angels to blot the record out. — Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton

Personal liberty is the paramount essential to human dignity and human happiness. — Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton

I cannot love as I have loved, And yet I know not why; It is the one great woe of life To feel all feeling die. — Edward G. Bulwer-Lytton

Nothing really immoral is ever permanently popular. — Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton

What is human is immortal! — Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton

He who esteems trifles for themselves is a trifler; he who esteems them for the conclusions to be drawn from them, or the advantage to which they can be put, is a philosopher. — Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton

We may observe in humorous authors that the faults they chiefly ridicule have often a likeness in themselves. Cervantes had much of the knight-errant in him; Sir George Etherege was unconsciously the Fopling Flutter of his own satire; Goldsmith was the same hero to chambermaids, and coward to ladies that he has immortalized in his charming comedy; and the antiquarian frivolities of Jonathan Oldbuck had their resemblance in Jonathan Oldbuck's creator. — Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton

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. — Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton

A friend who stands with you in pressure is more valuable than a hundred ones who stand with you in pleasure. — Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton

There is no such thing as luck. It's a fancy name for being always at our duty, and so sure to be ready when good time comes. — Edward G. Bulwer-Lytton

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. — Edward Bulwer-Lytton

The man who smokes, thinks like a sage and acts like a Samaritan. — Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton

When some one sorrow, that is yet reparable, gets hold of your mind like a monomania,
when you think, because Heaven has denied you this or that, on which you had set your heart, that all your life must be a blank,
oh, then diet yourself well on biography,
the biography of good and great men. See how little a space one sorrow really makes in life. See scarce a page, perhaps, given to some grief similar to your own, and how triumphantly the life sails on beyond it. — Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton

One vice worn out makes us wiser than fifty tutors. — Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton

As the excitement of the game increases, prudence is sure to diminish. — Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton

Happiness and virtue rest upon each other; the best are not only the happiest, but the happiest are usually the best. — Edward G. Bulwer-Lytton

Men are valued, not for what they are, but for what they seem to be. — Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton

Oratory, like the drama, abhors lengthiness; like the drama, it must keep doing. It avoids, as frigid, prolonged metaphysical soliloquy. Beauties themselves, if they delay or distract the effect which should be produced on the audience, become blemishes. — Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton

The more a man desirous to pass at a value above his worth can contrast, by dignified silence, the garrulity of trivial minds, the more the world will give him credit for the wealth which he does not possess. — Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton

When a person is down in the world, an ounce of help is better than a pound of preaching. — Edward G. Bulwer-Lytton

The bold sympathize with the bold; and in great hearts, there is always a certain friendship for a gallant foe. — Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton

As it has been finely expressed, "Principle is a passion for truth." And as an earlier and homelier writer hath it, "The truths we believe in are the pillars of our world. — Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton

social infancy, regarded the legends of their faith as a child reads a fairy tale, credulous of all that is supernatural in the agency--unconscious of all that may be philosophical in the moral. It is true, indeed, that dim — Edward Bulwer-Lytton

It is a glorious fever, desire to know. — Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton

I did not fall into love - I rose into love. — Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton

Every man loves and admires his own country because it produced him. — Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton

Only by the candle, held in the skeleton hand of Poverty, can man read his own dark heart. — Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton

Men and women make their own beauty or their own ugliness. Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton speaks in one of his novels of a man "who was uglier than he had any business to be;" and, if we could but read it, every human being carries his life in his face, and is good-looking or the reverse as that life has been good or evil. On our features the fine chisels of thought and emotion are eternally at work. — Alexander Smith

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. — Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton

The superstitious belief, common to miners, that gnomes or fiends dwell within the bowels of the earth, began to seize me. I shuddered at the thought of descending further and braving the inhabitants of this nether valley. Nor indeed could I have done so without ropes, as from the spot I had reached to the bottom of the chasm the sides of the rock sank down abrupt, smooth, and sheer. I retraced my steps with some difficulty. Now I have told you all. — Edward Bulwer-Lytton

Our very wretchedness grows dear to us when suffering for one we love. — Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton

One of the surest evidences of friendship that one individual can display to another is telling him gently of a fault. If any other can excel it, it is listening to such a disclosure with gratitude, and amending the error. — Edward Robert Bulwer-Lytton

Society is a long series of uprising ridges, which from the first to the last offer no valley of repose. Whenever you take your stand, you are looked down upon by those above you, and reviled and pelted by those below you. Every creature you see is a farthing Sisyphus, pushing his little stone up some Liliputian mole-hill. This is our world. — Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton

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. — Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton

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. — Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton

There is a great deal we never think of calling religion that is still fruit unto God, and garnered by Him in the harvest. The fruits of the Spirit are love, joy, peace, long suffering, gentleness, patience, goodness. I affirm that if these fruits are found in any form, whether you show your patience as a woman nursing a fretful child, or as a man attending to the vexing detail of a business, or as a physician following the dark mazes of sickness, or as a mechanic fitting the joints and valves of a locomotive; being honest true besides, you bring forth truth unto God. — Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton

Punctuality is the stern virtue of men of business, and the graceful courtesy of princes. — Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton

The mate for beauty should be a man and not a money chest. — Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton

You know There are moments when silence, prolonged and unbroken, More expressive may be than all words ever spoken. — Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton

The Italians have voices like peacocks - German gives me a cold in the head - and Russian is nothing but sneezing — Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton

Grief alone can teach us what is man. — Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton

A sense of contentment makes us kindly and benevolent to others; we are not chafed and galled by cares which are tyrannical because original. We are fulfilling our proper destiny, and those around us feel the sunshine of our own hearts. — Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton

Keep we to the broad truths before us; duty here; knowledge comes alone in the Hereafter. — Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton

In some exquisite critical hints on "Eurythmy," Goethe remarks, "that the best composition in pictures is that which, observing the most delicate laws of harmony, so arranges the objects that they by their position tell their own story." And the rule thus applied to composition in painting applies no less to composition in literature. — Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton

Tell me, sweet eyes, from what divinest star did ye drink in your liquid melancholy? — Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton

Genius in the poet, like the nomad of Arabia, ever a wanderer, still ever makes a home where the well or the palm-tree invites it to pitch the tent. Perpetually passing out of himself and his own positive circumstantial condition of being into other hearts and into other conditions, the poet obtains his knowledge of human life by transporting his own life into the lives of others. — Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton

Men who make money rarely saunter; men who save money rarely swagger. — Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton

Remorse is the echo of a lost virtue. — Edward G. Bulwer-Lytton

I was always an early riser. Happy the man who is! Every morning day comes to him with a virgin's love, full of bloom and freshness. The youth of nature is contagious, like the gladness of a happy child. — Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton

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. — Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton

No reproach is like that we clothe in a smile, and present with a bow. — Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton

Kindness like light speaks in the air it gilds. — Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton

Keep unscathed the good name; keep out of peril the honor without which even your battered old soldier who is hobbling into his grave on half-pay and a wooden leg would not change with Achilles. — Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton

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. — Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton

Nothing ages like laziness. — Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton

Common sense is only a modification of talent. Genius is an exaltation of it. The difference is, therefore, in degree, not nature. — Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton

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. — Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton

Shame is like the weaver's thread; if it breaks in the net, it is wholly imperfect. — Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton

Strive, while improving your one talent, to enrich your whole capital as a man. It is in this way that you escape from the wretched narrow-mindedness which is the characteristic of every one who cultivates his specialty alone. — Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton

It is noticeable how intuitively in age we go back with strange fondness to all that is fresh in the earliest dawn of youth. If we never cared for little children before, we delight to see them roll in the grass over which we hobble on crutches. The grandsire turns wearily from his middle-aged, careworn son, to listen with infant laugh to the prattle of an infant grandchild. It is the old who plant young trees; it is the old who are most saddened by the autumn; and feel most delight in the returning spring. — Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton

Sharp is the kiss of the falcon's beak. — Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton

Money is a terrible blab; she will betray the secrets of her owner, whatever he do to gag her. His virtues will creep out in her whisper; his vices she will cry aloud at the top of her tongue. — Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton

O be very sure That no man will learn anything at all, Unless he first will learn humility. — Edward G. Bulwer-Lytton

Better than fame is still the wish for fame, the constant training for a glorious strife. — Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton

Talent does what it can: Genius does what it must. — Edward Bulwer-Lytton

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. — Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton

Laws die, but Books never. — Edward Bulwer-Lytton

There is no tongue that flatters like a lover's; and yet, in the exaggeration of his feelings, flattery seems to him commonplace. Strange and prodigal exuberance, which soon exhausts itself by flowing! — Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton

In science, address the few, in literature the many. In science, the few must dictate opinion to the many; in literature, the many, sooner or later, force their judgement on the few. — Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton

We cannot of ourselves estimate the degree of our success in what we strive for. — Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton

There is nothing so agonizing to the fine skin of vanity as the application of a rough truth. — Edward Bulwer-Lytton

Alas," said Zee, "this predominance of the few over the many is the surest and most fatal sign of a race incorrigibly savage. See you not that the primary condition of mortal happiness consists in the extinction of that strife and competition between individuals, which, no matter what forms of government they adopt, render the many subordinate to the few, destroy real liberty to the individual, whatever may be the nominal liberty of the state, and annul that calm of existence, without which, felicity, mental or bodily, cannot be attained? — Edward Bulwer-Lytton

There is no past, as long as books shall live. Books make the past our heritage and our home. — Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton

Oh, can these men love, my Clodius? Scarcely even with the senses. How rarely a Roman has a heart! He is but the mechanism of genius - he wants its bones and flesh. — Edward Bulwer-Lytton