Top 350 Edward Bulwer-Lytton Quotes (2024 Update)
Page 5 of 8

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

— Edward Bulwer-Lytton

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

— Edward Bulwer-Lytton

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

— Edward Bulwer-Lytton

204. “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

205. “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

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

— Edward Bulwer-Lytton

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

— Edward Bulwer-Lytton

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

— Edward Bulwer-Lytton

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

— Edward Bulwer-Lytton

210. “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

211. “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

212. “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

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

— Edward Bulwer-Lytton

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

— Edward Bulwer-Lytton

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

— Edward Bulwer-Lytton

216. “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

217. “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

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

— Edward Bulwer-Lytton

219. “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

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

— Edward Bulwer-Lytton

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

— Edward Bulwer-Lytton

222. “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

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

— Edward Bulwer-Lytton

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

— Edward Bulwer-Lytton

225. “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

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

— Edward Bulwer-Lytton

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

— Edward Bulwer-Lytton

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

— Edward Bulwer-Lytton

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

— Edward Bulwer-Lytton

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

— Edward Bulwer-Lytton

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

— Edward Bulwer-Lytton

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

— Edward Bulwer-Lytton

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

— Edward Bulwer-Lytton

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

— Edward Bulwer-Lytton

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

— Edward Bulwer-Lytton

236. “A man who cannot win fame in big own age will have a very small chance of winning it from posterity. True, there are some half-dozen exceptions to this truth among millions of myriads that attest it; but what man of common sense would invest any large amount of hope in so unpromising a lottery?”

— Edward Bulwer-Lytton

237. “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

238. “It is often the easiest move that completes the game.”

— Edward Bulwer-Lytton

239. “Art employs method for the symmetrical formation of beauty, as science employs it for the logical exposition of truth; but the mechanical process is, in the last, ever kept visibly distinct, while in the first it escapes from sight amid the shows of color and the curves of grace.”

— Edward Bulwer-Lytton

240. “Injustice, they say, can only emanate from three causes: want of wisdom to perceive what is just, want of benevolence to desire, want of power to fulfill it; and that each of these three wants is incompatible in the All-Wise, the All-Good, the All-Powerful.”

— Edward Bulwer-Lytton

241. “People praise us behind our backs, but we hear them not; few before our faces, and who is not suspicious of the truth of such praise?”

— Edward Bulwer-Lytton

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

— Edward Bulwer-Lytton

243. “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

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

— Edward Bulwer-Lytton

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

— Edward Bulwer-Lytton

246. “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

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

— Edward Bulwer-Lytton

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

— Edward Bulwer-Lytton

249. “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

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

— Edward Bulwer-Lytton