Edward George Earle Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton (1803–73) was a British novelist, poet, and politician. Judged by his contemporaries a rival to Charles Dickens, this popular and productive novelist frequently broke new ground for the novel.
Born in London Bulwer-Lytton is most famous as the author of lengthy novels such as Falkland (1827,) Pelham: or The Adventures of a Gentleman (1828,) Eugene Aram (1832,) The Last Days of Pompeii (1834,) and Harold, the Last of the Saxon Kings (1848.) These novels won him immediate success and made him an affluent man.
Bulwer-Lytton entered Parliament representing St. Ives, Huntingdonshire, first as a Whig MP 1831–41 and, under the influence of Benjamin Disraeli, a Conservative MP 1851–66. He served as Secretary of State for the Colonies 1858–59, and was one of the founders of British Columbia. Even while he stayed an active politician, he found time to produce many novels, plays, and poems.
Bulwer-Lytton coined the catchphrases “the great unwashed,” “pursuit of the almighty dollar,” “the pen is mightier than the sword,” and “dweller on the threshold.” His novel Paul Clifford (1830) opens with one of the most famous opening lines in all of English literature: “It was a dark and stormy night….”
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton
The Creator has gifted the whole universe with language, but few are the hearts that can interpret it. Happy those to whom it is no foreign tongue, acquired imperfectly with care and pain, but rather a native language, learned unconsciously from the lips of the great mother.
—Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton
Topics: Language
But 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, 1st Baron Lytton
Topics: Procrastination
If we could annihilate evil we should annihilate hope, and hope is the avenue of faith.
—Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton
Topics: Evils
Gambling, in all countries, is the vice of the aristocracy.—The young find it established in the best circles, and enticed by the habits of others they are ruined when the habit becomes their own.
—Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton
Topics: Gambling
A life of pleasure makes even the strongest mind frivolous at last.
—Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton
Topics: Pleasure
As pauperism, in distinction from poverty, is dependence on other people for existence, and not on our own exertions, so there is a moral pauperism in the man who is dependent on others for that support of the moral life—self respect.
—Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton
Topics: Poverty
Dissimulation is often humble, often polished, grave, smooth, decorous; but it is rarely gay and jovial, a hearty laugher, or a merry, cordial, boon companion.
—Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton
Not the marriage of convenience, nor the marriage of reason, but the marriage of love.—All other marriage, with vows so solemn, with intimacy so close, is but acted falsehood and varnished sin.
—Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton
Topics: Marriage
Debt is to a man what the serpent is to the bird; its eye fascinates, its breath poisons, its coil crushes sinew and bone, its jaw is the pitiless grave.
—Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton
Topics: Debt
He who seeks repentance for the past, should woo the angel virtue for the future.
—Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton
Topics: Repentance
There is one way of attaining what we may term, if not utter, at least mortal happiness; it is by a sincere and unrelaxing activity for the happiness of others.
—Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton
Topics: Happiness
What is past is past, there is a future left to all men, who have the virtue to repent and the energy to atone.
—Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton
Topics: Forgiveness, Repentance
In life, as in art, the beautiful moves in curves.
—Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton
Topics: Beauty
In belief lies the secret of all valuable exertion.
—Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton
Topics: Belief
Oratory, like the drama, abhors lengthiness; like the drama, it must keep doing.—Beauties themselves, if they delay or distract the effect which should be produced on the audience, become blemishes.
—Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton
Nothing is so contagious as enthusiasm.—It is the real allegory of the tale of Orpheus; it moves stones, and charms brutes.—It is the genius of sincerity, and truth accomplishes no victories without it.
—Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton
Topics: Passion, Enthusiasm, Genius
As a general rule, people who flagrantly pretend to anything are the reverse of that which they pretend to. A man who sets up for a saint is sure to be a sinner, and a man who boasts that he is a sinner is sure to have some feeble, maudlin, snivelling bit of saintship about him which is enough to make him a humbug.
—Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton
What a rare gift is that of manners! How difficult to define; how much more difficult to impart!—Better for a man to possess them, than to have wealth, beauty, or talent; they will more than supply all.
—Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton
Topics: Manners
Fate! there is no fate.—Between the thought and the success God is the only agent.
—Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton
Topics: Fate
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, 1st Baron Lytton
Topics: Vanity
No reproach is like that we clothe in a smile, and present with a bow.
—Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton
Out of the ashes of misanthropy benevolence rises again; we find many virtues where we had imagined all was vice, many actions of disinterested friendship where we had fancied all was calculation and fraud,—and so gradually, from the two extremes, we pass to the proper medium; and feeling that no human being is wholly good or wholly base, we learn that true knowledge of mankind which induces us to expect little and forgive much. The world cures alike the optimist and the misanthrope.
—Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton
How a little praise warms out of a man the good that is in him, as the sneer of contempt which he feels is unjust chills the ardor to excel.
—Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton
Topics: Praise
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, and is often heard again, distinct and living, as when it first displaced the wavelets of the air.
—Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton
Topics: Music
Youth is in danger until it learns to look upon debts as furies.
—Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton
Topics: Youth, Debt
Revenge is a common passion; it is the sin of the uninstructed.—The savage deems it noble; but the religion of Christ, which is the sublime civilizer, emphatically condemns it. Why? Because religion ever seeks to ennoble man; and nothing so debases him as revenge.
—Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton
Topics: Revenge
In beginning the world, if you don’t wish to get chafed at every turn, fold up your pride carefully, and put it under lock and key, and only let it out to air on grand occasions.—It is a garment all stiff brocade outside, and all grating sackcloth on the side next to the skin.—Even kings do not wear the dalmaticum except at a coronation.
—Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton
Topics: Pride
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, 1st Baron Lytton
Extemporaneous speaking is, indeed, the groundwork of the orator’s art; preparation is the last finish, and the most difficult of all his accomplishments. To learn by heart as a schoolboy, or to prepare as an orator, are two things, not only essentially different, but essentially antagonistic to each other; for the work most opposed to an effective oration is an elegant essay.
—Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton
Youth, with swift feet, walks onward in the way; the land of joy lies all before his eyes.
—Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton
Topics: Youth, Time
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