Category: Edward George Earl Bulwer-Lytton

Memory, no less than hope, owes its charm to “the far away.”

In science, read, by preference the newest works; in literature, the oldest. The classics are always modern.

Fate laughs at probabilities.

The magic of the tongue is the most dangerous of all spells.

The easiest person to deceive is one’s own self.

A good heart is better than all the heads in the world.

Happy is the man who hath never known what it is to taste of fame-to have it is a purgatory, to want it is a hell.

The man who smokes, thinks like a sage and acts like a Samaritan.

There are times when the mirth of others only saddens us, especially the mirth of children with high spirits, that jar on our own quiet mood.

Buy my flowers,-oh buy, I pray!
The blind girl comes from afar.

When stars are in the quiet skies,
Then most I pine for thee;
Bend on me then thy tender eyes,
As stars look on the sea.

Rank is a great beautifier.

Two lives that once part are as ships that divide
When, moment on moment, there rushes between
The one and the other a sea;
Ah, never can fall from the days that have been
A gleam on the years that shall be!

Alone!-that worn-out word,
So idly spoken, and so coldly heard;
Yet all that poets sing and grief hath known
Of hopes laid waste, knells in that word ALONE!

The brilliant chief, irregularly great,
Frank, haughty, rash,–the Rupert of debate!

Our glories float between the earth and heaven
Like clouds which seem pavilions of the sun.

In the lexicon of youth, which fate reserves
For a bright manhood, there is no such word
As “fail.”

Ambition has no risk.

You speak
As one who fed on poetry.

Curse away!
And let me tell thee, Beauseant, a wise proverb
The Arabs have, “Curses are like young chickens,
And still come home to roost.”