Edward Bulwer-Lytton > Quotes

“Music, once admitted to the soul, becomes a sort of spirit, and never dies.”
― Edward Bulwer Lytton

“The pen is mightier than the sword!”
― Edward Bulwer-Lytton

“Talent does what it can: Genius does what it must.”
― Edward Bulwer-Lytton

“It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents, except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness.”
― Edward Bulwer Lytton, Paul Clifford

“To find what you seek in the road of life,
the best proverb of all is that which says:
"Leave no stone unturned.”
― Edward Bulwer Lytton

“We love the beautiful and serene, but we have a feeling as deep as love for the terrible and dark.”
― Edward Bulwer-Lytton

“He who doth not smoke hath either known no great griefs, or refuseth himself the softest consolation, next to that which comes from heaven.”
― Edward Bulwer-Lytton

“Patience is not passive; on the contrary, it is active; it is concentrated strength.”
― Edward George Bulwer-Lytton

“Punctuality is a virtue, If you don't mind being lonely.”
― Edward Bulwer-Lytton

“Beneath the rule of men entirely great, the pen is mightier than the sword.”
― Edward George Bulwer-Lytton

“A good heart is better than all the heads in the world.”
― Edward Bulwer- Lytton

“Laws die. Books never.”
― Edward George Bulwer Lytton

“In life, as in art, the beautiful moves in curves.”
― Edward Bulwer-Lytton UK Victorian Writer & Politician

“We are not such fools as to pay for reading inferior books, when we can read superior books for nothing.”
― Edward Bulwer Lytton, The Coming Race

“It was a dark and stormy night...”
― Edward George Bulwer-Lytton, Paul Clifford

“What mankind wants is not talent; it is purpose.”
― Edward George Bulwer-Lytton

“He who studies old books will always find in them something new, and he who reads new books will always find in them something old.”
― Edward Bulwer-Lytton, The Coming Race

“What men want is not talent, it is purpose; in other words, not the power to achieve, but will to labor. I believe that labor judiciously and continuously applied becomes genius.”
― Edward Bulwer-Lytton

“You will remember that Albertus Magnus, after describing minutely the process by which spirits may be invoked and commanded, adds emphatically that the process will instruct and avail only to the few - that a man must be born a magician! - that is, born with a peculiar physical temperament, as a man is born a poet. Rarely are men in whose constitution lurks this occult power of the highest order of intellect - usually in the intellect there is some twist, perversity, or disease.' ("The House And The Brain")”
― Edward George Bulwer-Lytton, Reign of Terror Volume 2: Great Victorian Horror Stories

“Dream manfully and nobly, and thy dreams shall be prophets”
― Edward Bulwer-Lytton

“To find what you seek in the road of life,the best proverb of all is that wich says:
"Leave no stone unturned.”
― edward bulwer lytton

“There is nothing so agonizing to the fine skin of vanity as the application of a rough truth.”
― Edward George Bulwer-Lytton

“Say what we will, you may be sure that ambition is an error; its wear and tear of heart are never recompensed, --it steals away the freshness of life, --it deadens its vivid and social enjoyments, --it shuts our souls to our own youth, --and we are old ere we remember that we have made a fever and a labor of our raciest years.”
― Bulwer Lytton

“The spelling and handwriting were those of a man imperfectly educated, but still the language itself was forcible. In the expressions of endearment there was a kind of rough, wild love; but here and there were dark unintelligible hints at some secret not of love,----some secret that seemed of crime. "We ought to love each other," was one of the sentences I remember, "for how everyone else would execrate us if all was known." Again: "Don't let anyone be in the same room with you at night,----you talk in your sleep." And again: "What's done can't be undone; and I tell you there's nothing against us unless the dead could come to life." Here there was underlined in a better handwriting (a female's), "They do!”
― Edward Bulwer Lytton Lytton, The Haunted and the Haunters; Or the House and the Brain

“The easiest person to deceive is one’s own self.”
― Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton

“It shames man not to feel man's human fear,
It shames man only if the fear subdue”
― Edward Lytton-Bulwer

“And that date, too, is far off?'

'Far off; when it comes, think your end in this world is at hand!'

'How and what is the end? Look east, west, south and north.'

'In the north, where you never yet trod, towards the point whence your instincts have warned you, there a spectre will seize you. 'Tis Death! I see a ship - it is haunted - 'tis chased - it sails on. Baffled navies sail after that ship. It enters the regions of ice. It passes a sky red with meteors. Two moons stand on high, over ice-reefs. I see the ship locked between white defiles - they are ice-rocks. I see the dead strew the decks - stark and livid, green mold on their limbs. All are dead, but one man - it is you! But years, though so slowly they come, have then scathed you. There is the coming of age on your brow, and the will is relaxed in the cells of the brain. Still that will, though enfeebled, exceeds all that man knew before you, through the will you live on, gnawed with famine; and nature no longer obeys you in that death-spreading region; the sky is a sky of iron, and the air has iron clamps, and the ice-rocks wedge in the ship. Hark how it cracks and groans. Ice will imbed it as amber imbeds a straw. And a man has gone forth, living yet, from the ship and its dead; and he has clambered up the spikes of an iceberg, and the two moons gaze down on his form. That man is yourself; and terror is on you - terror; and terror has swallowed your will. And I see swarming up the steep ice-rock, grey grisly things. The bears of the north have scented their quarry - they come near you and nearer, shambling and rolling their bulk, and in that day every moment shall seem to you longer than the centuries through which you have passed. And heed this - after life, moments continued make the bliss or the hell of eternity.'

'Hush,' said the whisper; 'but the day, you assure me, is far off - very far! I go back to the almond and rose of Damascus! - sleep!' ("The House And The Brain”
― Edward George Bulwer-Lytton, Reign of Terror Volume 2: Great Victorian Horror Stories

“On Sleep's soft lap the head without a crown
Forgot the gilded trouble it had worn”
― Edward Lytton-Bulwer

“to be
Thine evermore; youth mingled with thy youth,
Age with thine age; in thy grave mine; above,
Spirit beside thy spirit; - this the love
God teacheth man to pray for!”
― Edward Lytton-Bulwer

“And the bubbles of light again rose and fell, and in their disordered, irregular, turbulent maze, mingled with the wan moonlight. And now from these globules themselves as from the shell of an egg, monstrous things burst out; the air grew filled with them; larvae so bloodless and so hideous that I can in no way describe them except to remind the reader of the swarming life which the solar microscope brings before his eyes in a drop of water - things transparent, supple, agile, chasing each other, devouring each other - forms like nought ever beheld by the naked eye. As the shapes were without symmetry, so their movements were without order. In their very vagrancies there was no sport; they came round me and round, thicker and faster and swifter, swarming over my head, crawling over my right arm, which was outstretched in involuntary command against all evil beings. ("The House And The Brain")”
― Edward George Bulwer-Lytton, Reign of Terror Volume 2: Great Victorian Horror Stories