01c. 1839 ADThe circle of life is cut up into segments. All lines are equal if they are drawn from the centre and touch the circumference.Edward Bulwer Lytton / quote ↗
02c. 1839 ADLife consists in the alternate process of learning and unlearning; but it is often wiser to unlearn than to learn.Edward Bulwer Lytton / quote ↗
03c. 1839 ADFame 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 / quote ↗
04c. 1839 ADA man who cannot win fame in his 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 / quote ↗
05c. 1839 ADThere are many more fools in the world than there are knaves, otherwise the knaves could not exist.Edward Bulwer Lytton / quote ↗
06c. 1839 ADMore bounteous run rivers when the ice that locked their flow melts into their waters. And when fine natures relent, their kindness is swelled by the thaw.Edward Bulwer Lytton / quote ↗
07c. 1839 ADIt is often the easiest move that completes the game. Fortune is like the lady whom a lover carried off from all his rivals by putting an additional lace upon his liveries.Edward Bulwer Lytton / quote ↗
08c. 1839 ADThe friendship between great men is rarely intimate or permanent. It is a Boswell that most appreciates a Johnson. Genius has no brother, no co-mate; the love it inspires is that of a pupil or a son.Edward Bulwer Lytton / quote ↗
09c. 1839 ADThe grave is, I suspect, the sole commonwealth which attains that dead flat of social equality that life in its every principle so heartily abhors; and that equality the grave will perpetuate to the end of time.Edward Bulwer Lytton / quote ↗
10c. 1839 ADGreatness seems in her [Madame de Maintenon] to take its noblest form, that of simplicity.Edward Bulwer Lytton / quote ↗
11c. 1839 ADLove is rarely a hypocrite. But hate! how detect, and how guard against it. It lurks where you least expect it; it is created by causes that you can the least foresee; and civilization multiplies its varieties whilst it favors its disguise; for civilization increases the number of contending interests, and refinement renders more susceptible to the least irritation the cuticle of self-love.Edward Bulwer Lytton / quote ↗
12c. 1839 ADThere are two things in life that a sage must preserve at every sacrifice, the coats of his stomach and the enamel of his teeth. Some evils admit of consolations: there are no comforters for dyspepsia and the toothache.Edward Bulwer Lytton / quote ↗
13c. 1839 ADTo judge human character rightly, a man may sometimes have very small experience, provided he has a very large heart.Edward Bulwer Lytton / quote ↗
14c. 1839 ADKeep unscathed the good name, keep out of peril the honor, without which even your battered old soldier, who is hobbling into his grave on half pay and a wooden leg, would not change with Achilles.Edward Bulwer Lytton / quote ↗
15c. 1839 ADThe true proof of the inherent nobleness of our common nature is in the sympathy it betrays with what is noble wherever crowds are collected. Never believe the world is base; if it were so, no society could hold together for a day.Edward Bulwer Lytton / quote ↗
16c. 1839 ADTrees that, like the poplar, lift upwards all their boughs, give no shade and no shelter, whatever their height. Trees the most lovingly shelter and shade us when, like the willow, the higher soar their summits, the lowlier droop their bows.Edward Bulwer Lytton / quote ↗
17c. 1839 ADOur ideas, like orange-plants, spread out in proportion to the size of the box which imprisons the roots.Edward Bulwer Lytton / quote ↗
18c. 1839 ADNever mind what a man's virtues are; waste no time in learning them. Fasten at once on his infirmities.Edward Bulwer Lytton / quote ↗
19c. 1839 ADIn 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 / quote ↗
20c. 1839 ADThe commerce of intellect loves distant shores. The small retail dealer trades only with his neighbor; when the great merchant trades, he links the four quarters of the globe.Edward Bulwer Lytton / quote ↗
21c. 1839 ADIrony 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 / quote ↗
22c. 1839 ADWe lose the peace of years when we hunt after the rapture of moments.Edward Bulwer Lytton / quote ↗
23c. 1839 ADUpon any given point, contradictory evidence seldom puzzles the man who has mastered the laws of evidence, but he knows little of the laws of evidence who has not studied the unwritten law of the human heart; and without this last knowledge a man of action will not attain to the practical, nor will a poet achieve the ideal.Edward Bulwer Lytton / quote ↗
24c. 1839 ADAll the knowledge that we mortals can acquire is not knowledge positive, but knowledge comparative, and subject to the errors and passions of humanity.Edward Bulwer Lytton / quote ↗
