Lytton Quotes & Sayings

We are our own fates.- Our deeds are our own doomsmen.- Man's life was made not for creeds but actions. — Robert Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Earl Of Lytton

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

No life can be pure in its purpose, and strong in its strife, and all life not be purer and stronger thereby. — Robert Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Earl Of Lytton

We gain justice, judgment, with years, or else years are in vain. — Robert Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Earl Of 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

It is probably always disastrous not to be a poet. — Lytton Strachey

Words, however, are things. — Robert Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Earl Of 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

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

The history of the Victorian Age will never be written: we know too much about it. — Lytton Strachey

One has a few moments that are tolerable
one breathes,as it were,again;one remembers things,but one hardly hopes.I hope for the New Age-that is all-which will cure all our woes,and give us new ones,and make us happy enough for death ... — Lytton Strachey

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

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

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

Nothing really immoral is ever permanently popular. — 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

What is human is immortal! — 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

The world is filled with folly and sin, And Love must cling, where it can, I say: For Beauty is easy enough to win; But one isn't loved every day — Robert Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Earl Of Lytton

Though, with the ascendancy of Louis, the political power of the nobles finally came to an end, France remained, in the whole complexion of her social life, completely aristocratic. — Lytton Strachey

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

Also known as Judith Neville Lytton, the author of Toy Dogs and Their Ancestors had some illustrious ancestors of her own. Lady Wentworth was the great granddaughter of Lord Byron the poet, — Michael Brandow

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

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

With a very few exceptions, every word in the French vocabulary comes straight from the Latin. — Lytton Strachey

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

Every man loves and admires his own country because it produced him. — 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

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

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

The man who smokes, thinks like a sage and acts like a Samaritan. — 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

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

Perhaps the best test of a man's intelligence is his capacity for making a summary. — Lytton Strachey

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

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

Those true eyes Too pure and too honest in aught to disguise The sweet soul shining through them. — Robert Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Earl Of Lytton

Alas! must it ever be so? Do we stand in our own light, wherever we go, And fight our own shadows forever? — Robert Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Earl Of 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

Shame is like the weaver's thread; if it breaks in the net, it is wholly imperfect. — 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

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

Unlike the majority of the writers of his age, La Rochefoucauld was an aristocrat; and this fact gives a peculiar tone to his work. — Lytton Strachey

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

No reproach is like that we clothe in a smile, and present with a bow. — 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

Human beings are too important to be treated as mere symptoms of the past. They have a value which is independent of any temporal process--which is eternal, and must be felt for its own sake. — Lytton Strachey

Tell me, sweet eyes, from what divinest star did ye drink in your liquid melancholy? — 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

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

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

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

Gerald began - but was interrupted by a piercing whistle which cost him ten percent of his hearing permanently, as it did everyone else in a ten-mile radius of the eruption, not that it mattered much because for them "permanently" meant the next ten minutes or so until buried by searing lava or suffocated by choking ash - to pee. — Jim Gleeson

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

Englishmen have always loved Moliere. — Lytton Strachey

Unseen hands delay The coming of what oft seems close in ken, And, contrary, the moment, when we say "'Twill never come!" comes on us even then. — Robert Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Earl Of Lytton

When the onward rush of a powerful spirit sweeps a weaker one to its destruction, the commonplaces of the moral judgement are better left unmade. — Lytton Strachey

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

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

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

If this is dying, I don't think much of it. — Lytton Strachey

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

Since we parted yester eve, I do love thee, love, believe, Twelve times dearer, twelve hours longer,- One dream deeper, one night stronger, One sun surer,-thus much more Than I loved thee, love, before. — Robert Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Earl Of 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

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

In sheer genius Pascal ranks among the very greatest writers who have lived upon this earth. And his genius was not simply artistic; it displayed itself no less in his character and in the quality of his thought. — Lytton Strachey

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

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

It was not by gentle sweetness and self-abnegation that order was brought out of chaos; it was by strict method, by stern discipline, by rigid attention to detail, by ceaseless labor, by the fixed determination of an indomitable will. — Lytton Strachey

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