English author & politician (1803-1873)
Love is a very contradiction of all the elements of our ordinary nature -- it makes the proud man meek -- the cheerful, sad -- the high-spirited, tame; our strongest resolutions, our hardiest energy fail before it. Believe me, you cannot prophesy of its future effect in a man from any knowledge of his past character.
EDWARD BULWER-LYTTON
Eugene Aram: A Tale
What men want is not talent, it is purpose; in other words, not the power to achieve but the will to labour.
EDWARD BULWER-LYTTON
Lucretia; or, The children of Night
How fair, to sinless Adam, Eden smiled! But sin brought tears, and Eden was wild!
EDWARD BULWER-LYTTON
Constance; Or, The Portrait
Society is a long series of uprising ridges which from the first to the last offer no valley of repose; wherever you take your stand, you are looked down upon by those above you, and reviled and pelted by those below you. Every creature you see is a farthing Sisyphus, pushing his little stone up some Lilliputian mole-hill.
EDWARD BULWER-LYTTON
attributed, Day's Collacon
The public man needs but one patron, namely the lucky moment.
EDWARD BULWER-LYTTON
written under pseudonym of Pisistratus Caxton, What Will He Do With It?
Dream, O youth! Dream manfully and nobly, and thy dreams shall be prophets!
EDWARD BULWER-LYTTON
The Caxtons: A Family Picture
Music, once admitted to the soul becomes ... a sort of spirit, and never dies. It wanders perturbedly through the halls and galleries of the memory.
EDWARD BULWER-LYTTON
Zanoni
Labour is the purgatory of the erring.
EDWARD BULWER-LYTTON
Lucretia; or, The children of Night
When the soul communes with itself the lip is silent.
EDWARD BULWER-LYTTON
Harold, the Last of the Saxon Kings
Rank is a great beautifier.
EDWARD BULWER LYTTON
The Lady of Lyons
What, after all, is Heaven but a transition, from dim guesses and blind struggling with a mysterious and adverse fate, to the fullness of all wisdom.
EDWARD BULWER-LYTTON
The Student: A Series of Papers
Why should the soul ever repose? God, its Principle, reposes never.
EDWARD BULWER-LYTTON
Lucretia; or, The children of Night
I know not why we should delay our tokens of respect to those who merit them, until the heart that our sympathy could have gladdened has ceased to beat. As men cannot read the epitaphs inscribed upon the marble that covers them, so the tombs that we erect to virtue often only prove our repentance that we neglected it when with us.
EDWARD BULWER LYTTON
attributed, Day's Collacon
Truth makes on the surface of nature no one track of light -- every eye looking on finds its own.
EDWARD BULWER-LYTTON
Caxtoniana
Fate laughs at probabilities.
EDWARD BULWER-LYTTON
Eugene Aram
Though Hope be a small child, she can carry a great anchor!
EDWARD BULWER-LYTTON
The Last of the Barons
You speak
As one who fed on poetry.
EDWARD BULWER-LYTTON
Richelieu
There's no weapon that slays its victim so surely (if well aimed) as praise.
EDWARD BULWER-LYTTON
"Lucile"
Patience is a good palfrey, and will carry us a long day.
EDWARD BULWER-LYTTON
The Last of the Barons
Lips with such sweetness in their honeyed deeps
As fills the rose in which a fairy sleeps.
EDWARD BULWER LYTTON
King Arthur