Top 350 Edward Bulwer-Lytton Quotes (2024 Update)
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201. “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

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

— Edward Bulwer-Lytton

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

— Edward Bulwer-Lytton

204. “Earnestness is the best gift of mental power, and deficiency of heart is the cause of many men never becoming great.”

— Edward Bulwer-Lytton

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

— Edward Bulwer-Lytton

206. “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

207. “Bright and illustrious illusions! Who can blame, who laugh at the boy, who not admire and commend him, for that desire of a fame outlasting the Pyramids by which he insensibly learns to live in a life beyond the present, and nourish dreams of a good unattainable by the senses?”

— Edward Bulwer-Lytton

208. “Toil to some is happiness, and rest to others. This man can only breathe in crowds, and that man only in solitudes.”

— Edward Bulwer-Lytton

209. “If there is a virtue in the world at which we should always aim, it is cheerfulness.”

— Edward Bulwer-Lytton

210. “The same refinement which brings us new pleasures exposes us to new pains.”

— Edward Bulwer-Lytton

211. “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

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

— Edward Bulwer-Lytton

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

— Edward Bulwer-Lytton

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

— Edward Bulwer-Lytton

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

— Edward Bulwer-Lytton

216. “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

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

— Edward Bulwer-Lytton

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

— Edward Bulwer-Lytton

219. “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

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

— Edward Bulwer-Lytton

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

— Edward Bulwer-Lytton

222. “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

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

— Edward Bulwer-Lytton

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

— Edward Bulwer-Lytton

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

— Edward Bulwer-Lytton

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

— Edward Bulwer-Lytton

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

— Edward Bulwer-Lytton

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

— Edward Bulwer-Lytton

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

— Edward Bulwer-Lytton

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

— Edward Bulwer-Lytton

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

— Edward Bulwer-Lytton

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

— Edward Bulwer-Lytton

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

— Edward Bulwer-Lytton

234. “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

235. “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

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

— Edward Bulwer-Lytton

237. “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

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

— Edward Bulwer-Lytton

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

— Edward Bulwer-Lytton

240. “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

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

— Edward Bulwer-Lytton

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

— Edward Bulwer-Lytton

243. “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

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

— Edward Bulwer-Lytton

245. “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

246. “The frenzy of nations is the statesmanship of fate.”

— Edward Bulwer-Lytton

247. “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

248. “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

249. “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

250. “At court one becomes a sort of human ant eater, and learns to catch one’s prey by one’s tongue.”

— Edward Bulwer-Lytton