Top 350 Edward Bulwer-Lytton Quotes (2026 Update)
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251. “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

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

— Edward Bulwer-Lytton

253. “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

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

— Edward Bulwer-Lytton

255. “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

256. “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

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

— Edward Bulwer-Lytton

258. “The superstitious belief, common to miners, that gnomes or fiends dwell within the bowels of the earth, began to seize me. I shuddered at the thought of descending further and braving the inhabitants of this nether valley. Nor indeed could I have done so without ropes, as from the spot I had reached to the bottom of the chasm the sides of the rock sank down abrupt, smooth, and sheer. I retraced my steps with some difficulty. Now I have told you all.”

— Edward Bulwer-Lytton

259. “Poverty has strange bedfellows.”

— Edward Bulwer-Lytton

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

— Edward Bulwer-Lytton

261. “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

262. “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

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

— Edward Bulwer-Lytton

264. “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

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

— Edward Bulwer-Lytton

266. “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

267. “Vanity, indeed, is the very antidote to conceit; for while the former makes us all nerve to the opinion of others, the latter is perfectly satisfied with its opinion of itself.”

— Edward Bulwer-Lytton

268. “Happy is the man who hath never known what it is to taste of fame -to have it is a purgatory, to want it is a Hell!”

— Edward Bulwer-Lytton

269. “Poverty is relative, and, therefor not ignoble.”

— Edward Bulwer-Lytton

270. “The higher the rank the less pretence, because there is less to pretend to.”

— Edward Bulwer-Lytton

271. “As the excitement of the game increases, prudence is sure to diminish.”

— Edward Bulwer-Lytton

272. “A man of genius is inexhaustible only in proportion as he is always renourishing his genius.”

— Edward Bulwer-Lytton

273. “The affections are immortal! They are the sympathies which unite the ceaseless generations.”

— Edward Bulwer-Lytton

274. “Centuries roll, customs change, but, ever since the time of the earliest mother, woman yearns to be the soother.”

— Edward Bulwer-Lytton

275. “Nothing can constitute good-breeding that has not good-nature for its foundation.”

— Edward Bulwer-Lytton

276. “Revenge is a common passion; it is the sin of the uninstructed.”

— Edward Bulwer-Lytton

277. “The grave is, I suspect, the sole commonwealth which attains that dead flat of social equality that life in its every principle so heartily abhors.”

— Edward Bulwer-Lytton

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

— Edward Bulwer-Lytton

279. “Of all the weaknesses little men rail against, there is none that they are more apt to ridicule than the tendency to believe. And of all the signs of a corrupt heart and a feeble head, the tendency of incredulity is the surest. Real philosophy seeks rather to solve than to deny.”

— Edward Bulwer-Lytton

280. “Women love energy and grand results.”

— Edward Bulwer-Lytton

281. “The brave man wants no charms to encourage him to his duty, and the good man scorns all warnings that would deter him from fulfilling it.”

— Edward Bulwer-Lytton

282. “There is no man so great as not to have some littleness more predominant than all his greatness. Our virtues are the dupes, and often only the plaything of our follies.”

— Edward Bulwer-Lytton

283. “In families well ordered, there is always one firm, sweet temper, which controls without seeming to dictate. The Greeks represented Persuasion as crowned.”

— Edward Bulwer-Lytton

284. “The secret of fashion is to surprise and never to disappoint.”

— Edward Bulwer-Lytton

285. “Fame confers a rank above that of gentleman and of kings. As soon as she issues her patent of nobility, it matters not a straw whether the recipient be the son of a Bourbon or of a tallow-chandler.”

— Edward Bulwer-Lytton

286. “When you borrow on your character, it is your character that you leave in pawn.”

— Edward Bulwer-Lytton

287. “I will believe him to have been a very respectable man, who only spoke the truth when he boasted of his power to be in two places at the same time.” “Is that so difficult?” said the old gentleman; “if so, you have never dreamed!”

— Edward Bulwer-Lytton

288. “Nothing ages like laziness.”

— Edward Bulwer-Lytton

289. “In how large a proportion of creatures is existence composed of one ruling passion, the most agonizing of all sensations – fear.”

— Edward Bulwer-Lytton

290. “Our very wretchedness grows dear to us when suffering for one we love.”

— Edward Bulwer-Lytton

291. “The art of medicine will then be honoured in the place of war, which is the art of murder: the noblest study of the acutest minds will be devoted to the discovery and arrest of the causes of disease. Life, I grant, cannot be made eternal; but it may be prolonged almost indefinitely. And as the meaner animal bequeaths its vigour to its offspring, so man shall transmit his improved organisation, mental and physical, to his sons.”

— Edward Bulwer-Lytton

292. “A woman too often reasons from her heart; hence two-thirds of her mistakes and her troubles.”

— Edward Bulwer-Lytton

293. “Man hazards the condition and loses the virtues of a freeman, in proportion as he accustoms his thoughts to view without anguish or shame, his lapse into the bondage of debtor.”

— Edward Bulwer-Lytton

294. “Vanity calculates but poorly on the vanity of others; what a virtue we should distil from frailty, what a world of pain we should save our brethren, if we would suffer our own weakness to be the measure of theirs.”

— Edward Bulwer-Lytton

295. “We must remember how apt man is to extremes – rushing from credulity and weakness to suspicion and distrust.”

— Edward Bulwer-Lytton

296. “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

297. “Ah, what without a heaven would be even love! – a perpetual terror of the separation that must one day come.”

— Edward Bulwer-Lytton

298. “The food of hope is meditative action.”

— Edward Bulwer-Lytton

299. “In the hour of strait and need, we measure men’s stature not by the body, but the soul!”

— Edward Bulwer-Lytton

300. “The mind profits by the wrecks of every passion.”

— Edward Bulwer-Lytton