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
What we call eternity may be but an endless series of the transitions which men call deaths, abandonments of home, going ever to fairer scenes and loftier heights.—Age after age, the spirit—that glorious nomad—may shift its tent, carrying with it evermore its elements, activity and desire.
—Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton
Topics: Eternity
A ballroom is nothing more or less than a great market place of beauty.—For my part, were I a buyer, I should like making my purchases in a less public mart.
—Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton
Topics: Dancing
Nature—a thing which science and art never appear to see with the same eyes. If to an artist nature has a soul, why, so has a steam-engine. Art gifts with soul all matter that it contemplates; science turns all that is already gifted with soul into matter.
—Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton
Topics: Nature
Power is so characteristically calm, that calmness in itself has the aspect of power, and forbearance implies strength.
—Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton
Topics: Power
It is an error to suppose that courage means courage in everything. Most people are brave only in the dangers to which they accustom themselves, either in imagination or practice.
—Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton
Topics: Courage
He whom God hath gifted with the love of retirement, possesses, as it were, an extra sense.
—Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton
Topics: Retirement
On the imagination God sometimes paints, by dream and symbol, the likeness of things to come.—What the foolish-wise call fanaticism, belongs to the same part of us as hope.—Each is the yearning of the soul for the great “Beyond,” which attests our immortality.
—Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton
Topics: Immortality
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
Nothing conveys a more inaccurate idea of a whole truth than a part of a truth so prominently brought forth as to throw the other parts into shadow.—This is the art of caricature, by the happy use of which you might caricature the Apollo Belvidere.
—Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton
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, 1st Baron Lytton
Topics: Influence
The great secrets of being courted, are, to shun others and to seem delighted with yourself.
—Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton
Topics: Popularity
It is not by the gray of the hair that one knows the age of the heart.
—Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton
Topics: Age
To dispense with ceremony is the most delicate mode of conferring a compliment.
—Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton
Topics: Praise
The same refinement which brings us new pleasures, exposes us to new pains.
—Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton
Topics: Pain
Poverty is the wicked man’s tempter, the good man’s perdition, the proud man’s curse, the melancholy man’s halter.
—Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton
Topics: Poverty
Talent does what it can; genius does what it must.
—Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton
Topics: War, Talent, Genius
A man who cannot win fame in his own age, will have a very small chance of winning it from posterity.—There may be some half dozen exceptions to this truth among 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, 1st Baron Lytton
Topics: Fame
Reading without purpose is sauntering, not exercise. More is got from one book on which the thought settles for a definite end in knowledge, than from libraries skimmed over by a wandering eye. A cottage flower gives honey to the bee, a king’s garden none to the butterfly.
—Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton
Topics: Books, Reading
As has been finely expressed, “Principle is a passion for truth,” And as an earlier and homelier writer hath it, “The truths we believe in are the pillars of our world.”
—Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton
Topics: Truth
It seems to me as if not only the form but the soul of man was made to walk erect and look upon the stars.
—Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton
Topics: Soul
A good man does good merely by living.
—Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton
Topics: Influence
He who esteems trifles for themselves is a trifler; he who esteems them for the conclusions to be drawn from them, or the advantage to which they can be put, is a philosopher.
—Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton
Topics: Trifles
Hope warps judgment in council, but quickens energy in action.
—Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton
Topics: Hope
Irony is to the high-bred what billingsgate is to the vulgar; and when one gentleman thinks another gentleman an ass, he does not say it point-blank; he implies it in the politest terms he can invent.
—Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton
Wonder, says Aristotle, “is the first cause of philosophy.” This is quite as true in the progress of the individual as in that of the concrete mind; and the constant aim of philosophy is to destroy its parent.
—Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton
Topics: Wonder
That one vast thought of God which we call the world.
—Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton
Topics: World
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
Every street has two sides, the shady side and the sunny. When two men shake hands and part, mark which of the two takes the sunny side; he will be the younger man of the two.
—Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton
Topics: Choices, Choice
Patience is the courage of the conqueror, the strength of man against destiny—of the one against the world, and of the soul against matter.—Therefore it is the courage of the gospel; and its importance, in a social view and to races and institutions, cannot be too earnestly inculcated.
—Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton
Topics: Patience
There is certainly something of exquisite kindness and thoughtful benevolence in that rarest of gifts,—fine breeding.
—Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton
Topics: Manners
The truest eloquence is that which holds us too mute for applause.
—Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton
Topics: Eloquence
A good cigar is as great a comfort to a man as a good cry is to a woman.
—Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton
Topics: Men and Women, Men & Women, Women, Men
Do ye not laugh, O, listening friends, when men praise those dead whose virtues they discovered not when living?—It takes much marble to build the sepulchre.—How little of lath and plaster would have repaired the garret!
—Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton
Topics: Epitaphs
He who distrusts the security of chance takes more pains to effect the safety which results from labor. 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, 1st Baron Lytton
Topics: Chance
The surest way of making a dupe is to let your victim suppose you are his.
—Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton
Topics: Deceit
Would you throughout life be up to the height of your century, always in the prime of man’s reason, without crudeness and without decline, live habitually, while young, with persons older, and when old with persons younger than yourself.
—Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton
Topics: Life
The real truthfulness of all works of imagination,—sculpture, painting, and written fiction, is so purely in the imagination, that the artist never seeks to represent positive truth, but the idealized image of a truth.
—Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton
Topics: Art
Give, and you may keep your friend it you lose your money; lend, and the chances are that you lose your friend if ever you get back your money
—Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton
Topics: Giving
Money never can be well managed if sought solely through the greed of money for its own sake. In all meanness there is a defect of intellect as well as of heart. And even the cleverness of avarice is but the cunning of imbecility.
—Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton
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
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