Top 350 Edward Bulwer-Lytton Quotes (2025 Update)
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201. “When the world frowns, we can face it; but let it smile, and we are undone.”

— Edward Bulwer-Lytton

202. “In belief lies the secret of all valuable exertion.”

— Edward Bulwer-Lytton

203. “The astronomer who catalogues the stars cannot add one atom to the universe; the poet can call an universe from the atom.”

— Edward Bulwer-Lytton

204. “Husband and wife have so many interests in common that when they have jogged through the ups and downs of life a sufficient time, the leash which at first galled often grows easy and familiar.”

— Edward Bulwer-Lytton

205. “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

206. “Fine natures are like fine poems; a glance at the first two lines suffices for a guess into the beauty that waits you if you read on.”

— Edward Bulwer-Lytton

207. “The curse of the great is ennui.”

— Edward Bulwer-Lytton

208. “Agreeable surprises are the perquisites of youth.”

— Edward Bulwer-Lytton

209. “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

210. “There is an ill-breeding to which, whatever our rank and nature, we are almost equally sensitive, the ill-breeding that comes from want of consideration for others.”

— Edward Bulwer-Lytton

211. “It is an error to suppose that courage means courage in everything.”

— Edward Bulwer-Lytton

212. “I have wrought great use out of evil tools.”

— Edward Bulwer-Lytton

213. “A mind once cultivated will not lie fallow for half an hour.”

— Edward Bulwer-Lytton

214. “Thought is valuable in proportion as it is generative.”

— Edward Bulwer-Lytton

215. “The man who has acquired the habit of study, though for only one hour every day in the year, and keeps to the one thing studied till it is mastered, will be startled to see the way he has made at the end of a twelvemonth.”

— Edward Bulwer-Lytton

216. “Books are but waste paper unless we spend in action the wisdom we get from thought.”

— Edward Bulwer-Lytton

217. “A woman is seldom merciful to the man who is timid.”

— Edward Bulwer-Lytton

218. “The Italians have voices like peacocks – German gives me a cold in the head – and Russian is nothing but sneezing.”

— Edward Bulwer-Lytton

219. “The prudent person may direct a state, but it is the enthusiast who regenerates or ruins it.”

— Edward Bulwer-Lytton

220. “As the films of clay are removed from our eyes, Death loses the false aspect of the spectre, and we fall at last into its arms as a wearied child upon the bosom of its mother.”

— Edward Bulwer-Lytton

221. “The first essential to success in the art you practice is respect for the art itself.”

— Edward Bulwer-Lytton

222. “Bu is a word that cools many a warm impulse, stifles many a kindly thought, puts a dead stop to many a brotherly deed. No one would ever love his neighbor as himself if he listened to all the Buts that could be said.”

— Edward Bulwer-Lytton

223. “Some have the temperament and tastes of genius, without its creative power. They feel acutely, but express tamely.”

— Edward Bulwer-Lytton

224. “No author ever drew a character consistent to human nature, but he was forced to ascribe to it many inconsistencies.”

— Edward Bulwer-Lytton

225. “One vice worn out makes us wiser than fifty tutors.”

— Edward Bulwer-Lytton

226. “Julius Caesar owed two millions when he risked the experiment of being general in Gaul. If Julius Caesar had not lived to cross the Rubicon, and pay off his debts, what would his creditors have called Julius Caesar?”

— Edward Bulwer-Lytton

227. “In other countries poverty is a misfortune – with us it is a crime.”

— Edward Bulwer-Lytton

228. “Curse away! And let me tell thee, Beausant, a wise proverb The Arabs have,-“Curses are like young chickens, And still come home to roost.””

— Edward Bulwer-Lytton

229. “The fewer blows, the better. Brave men fight if they must; wise men never fight if they can help it.”

— Edward Bulwer-Lytton

230. “Prudence, patience, labor, valor; these are the stars that rule the career of mortals.”

— Edward Bulwer-Lytton

231. “Despair makes victims sometimes victors.”

— Edward Bulwer-Lytton

232. “Almanzor, in Dryden’s tragedy of “Almahide,” did not change sides with more gallant indifference than the exemplary nurse.”

— Edward Bulwer-Lytton

233. “Nothing really immoral is ever permanently popular.”

— Edward Bulwer-Lytton

234. “It is the glorious doom of literature that the evil perishes and the good remains.”

— Edward Bulwer-Lytton

235. “Grief alone can teach us what is man.”

— Edward Bulwer-Lytton

236. “There are times when the mirth of others only saddens us, especially the mirth of children with high spirits, that jar on our own quiet mood.”

— Edward Bulwer-Lytton

237. “To the thinker, the most trifling external object often suggests ideas, which, like Homer’s chain, extend, link after link, from earth to heaven.”

— Edward Bulwer-Lytton

238. “Jewelry and profuse ornaments are unmistakable evidences of vulgarity.”

— Edward Bulwer-Lytton

239. “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

240. “Read to live, not live to read.”

— Edward Bulwer-Lytton

241. “The commerce of intellect loves distant shores. The small retail dealer trades only with his neighbor; when the great merchant trades he links the four quarters of the globe.”

— Edward Bulwer-Lytton

242. “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

243. “Fiction may be said to be the caricature of history.”

— Edward Bulwer-Lytton

244. “Why should the soul ever repose? God, its Principle, reposes never.”

— Edward Bulwer-Lytton

245. “The object of ambition, unlike that of love, never being wholly possessed, ambition is the more durable passion of the two.”

— Edward Bulwer-Lytton

246. “But never yet the dog our country fed, Betrayed the kindness or forgot the bread.”

— Edward Bulwer-Lytton

247. “The world thinks eccentricity in great things is genius, but in small things, only crazy.”

— Edward Bulwer-Lytton

248. “Death is the only monastery; the tomb is the only cell, and the grave that adjoins the convent is the bitterest mock of its futility.”

— Edward Bulwer-Lytton

249. “Business dispatched is business well done, but business hurried is business ill done.”

— Edward Bulwer-Lytton

250. “Philosophers have done wisely when they have told us to cultivate our reason rather than our feelings, for reason reconciles us to the daily things of existence; our feelings teach us to yearn after the far, the difficult, the unseen.”

— Edward Bulwer-Lytton