Top 350 Edward Bulwer-Lytton Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “He who doth not smoke hath either known no great griefs, or refuseth himself the softest consolation, next to that which comes from heaven.”

— Edward Bulwer-Lytton

102. “Shame is like the weaver’s thread; if it breaks in the net, it is wholly imperfect.”

— Edward Bulwer-Lytton

103. “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

104. “Love is rarely a hypocrite; but hate – how detect and how guard against it! It lurks where you least expect it; it is created by causes that you can the least foresee; and civilization multiplies its varieties, whilst it favors its disguise.”

— Edward Bulwer-Lytton

105. “Love thou rose, yet leave it on its stem.”

— Edward Bulwer-Lytton

106. “Trees that, like the poplar, lift upward all their boughs, give no shade and no shelter, whatever their height. Trees the most lovingly shelter and shade us, when, like the willow, the higher soar their summits, the lower drop their boughs.”

— Edward Bulwer-Lytton

107. “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

108. “Emotion, whether of ridicule, anger, or sorrow, – whether raised at a puppet show, a funeral, or a battle, – is your grandest of levellers. The man who would be always superior should be always apathetic.”

— Edward Bulwer-Lytton

109. “The law is a gun, which if it misses a pigeon always kills a crow; if it does not strike the guilty, it hits someone else. As every crime creates a law, so in turn every law creates a crime.”

— Edward Bulwer-Lytton

110. “We love the beautiful and serene, but we have a feeling as deep as love for the terrible and dark.”

— Edward Bulwer-Lytton

111. “The best teacher is the one who suggests rather than dogmatizes, and inspires his listener with the wish to teach himself.”

— Edward Bulwer-Lytton

112. “Fortune is said to be blind, but her favorites never are. Ambition has the eye of the eagle, prudence that of the lynx; the first looks through the air, the last along the ground.”

— Edward Bulwer-Lytton

113. “Childhood and genius have the same master organ in common – inquisitiveness.”

— Edward Bulwer-Lytton

114. “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

115. “Love is on the verge of hate each time it stoops for pardon.”

— Edward Bulwer-Lytton

116. “There is one form of hope which is never unwise, and which certainly does not diminish with the increase of knowledge. In that form it changes its name, and we call it patience.”

— Edward Bulwer-Lytton

117. “Rarest of all things on earth is the union in which both, by their contrasts, make harmonious their blending; each supplying the defects of the helpmate, and completing, by fusion, one strong human soul.”

— Edward Bulwer-Lytton

118. “Youth is in danger until it learns to look upon debts as furies.”

— Edward Bulwer-Lytton

119. “Tell me, sweet eyes, from what divinest star did ye drink in your liquid melancholy?”

— Edward Bulwer-Lytton

120. “A man’s ancestry is a positive property to him.”

— Edward Bulwer-Lytton

121. “A reform is a correction of abuses; a revolution is a transfer of power.”

— Edward Bulwer-Lytton

122. “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

123. “Writers are the main landmarks of the past.”

— Edward Bulwer-Lytton

124. “What is human is immortal!”

— Edward Bulwer-Lytton

125. “A man is already of consequence in the world when it is known that we can implicitly rely upon him. Often I have known a man to be preferred in stations of honor and profit because he had this reputation: When he said he knew a thing, he knew it, and when he said he would do a thing, he did it.”

— Edward Bulwer-Lytton

126. “Every great man exhibits the talent of organization or construction, whether it be in a poem, a philosophical system, a policy, or a strategy. And without method there is no organization nor construction.”

— Edward Bulwer-Lytton

127. “Not in the knowledge of things without, but in the perfection of the soul within, lies the empire of man aspiring to be more than man.”

— Edward Bulwer-Lytton

128. “Refuse to be ill. Never tell people you are ill; never own it to yourself. Illness is one of those things which a man should resist on principle at the onset.”

— Edward Bulwer-Lytton

129. “Birds sing in vain to the ear, flowers bloom in vain to the eye, of mortified vanity and galled ambition. He who would know repose in retirement must carry into retirement his destiny, integral and serene, as the Caesars transported the statue of Fortune into the chamber they chose for their sleep.”

— Edward Bulwer-Lytton

130. “Only by the candle, held in the skeleton hand of Poverty, can man read his own dark heart.”

— Edward Bulwer-Lytton

131. “A man’s heart must be very frivolous if the possession of fame rewards the labor to attain it. For the worst of reputation is that it is not palpable or present – we do not feel or see or taste it.”

— Edward Bulwer-Lytton

132. “The desire of excellence is the necessary attribute of those who excel. We work little for a thing unless we wish for it.”

— Edward Bulwer-Lytton

133. “It is the misfortune of all miscellaneous political combinations, that with the purest motives of their more generous members are ever mixed the most sordid interests and the fiercest passions of mean confedes.”

— Edward Bulwer-Lytton

134. “The cleverness of avarice is but the cunning of imbecility.”

— Edward Bulwer-Lytton

135. “Life is short – while we speak it flies; enjoy, then, the present, and forget the future; such is the moral of ancient poetry, a graceful and a wise moral – indulged beneath a southern sky, and all deserving, the phrase applied to it – the philosophy of the garden.”

— Edward Bulwer-Lytton

136. “Remedy your deficiencies, and your merits will take care of themselves. Every man has in him good and evil. His good is his valiant army, his evil is his corrupt commissariat; reform the commissariat and the army will do its duty.”

— Edward Bulwer-Lytton

137. “It is, the most beautiful truth in morals that we have no such thing as a distinct or divided interest from our race. In their welfare is ours, and by choosing the broadest paths to effect their happiness we choose the surest and the shortest to our own.”

— Edward Bulwer-Lytton

138. “Castles in the air cost a vast deal to keep up.”

— Edward Bulwer-Lytton

139. “Two lives that once part are as ships that divide.”

— Edward Bulwer-Lytton

140. “He that fancies himself very enlightened, because he sees the deficiencies of others, may be very ignorant, because he has not studied his own.”

— Edward Bulwer-Lytton

141. “A life of pleasure makes even the strongest mind frivolous at last.”

— Edward Bulwer-Lytton

142. “Art does not imitate nature, but founds itself on the study of nature, takes from nature the selections which best accord with its own intention, and then bestows on them that which nature does not possess, viz: The mind and soul of man.”

— Edward Bulwer-Lytton

143. “If you wish to be loved, show more of your faults than your virtues.”

— Edward Bulwer-Lytton

144. “Alone!-that worn-out word, So idly spoken, and so coldly heard; Yet all that poets sing and grief hath known Of hopes laid waste, knells in that word ALONE!”

— Edward Bulwer-Lytton

145. “Let youth cherish sleep, the happiest of earthly boons, while yet it is at its command; for there cometh the day to all when “neither the voice of the lute nor the birds” shall bring back the sweet slumbers that fell on their young eyes as unbidden as the dews.”

— Edward Bulwer-Lytton

146. “There is no man so friendless but that he can find a friend sincere enough to tell him disagreeable truths.”

— Edward Bulwer-Lytton

147. “More bounteous run rivers when the ice that locked their flow melts into their waters. And when fine natures relent, their kindness is swelled by the thaw.”

— Edward Bulwer-Lytton

148. “The strong and virtuous admit no destiny.”

— Edward Bulwer-Lytton

149. “There is but one philosophy and its name is fortitude! To bear is to conquer our fate.”

— Edward Bulwer-Lytton

150. “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