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If aught be worse than failure from overstress of a life's prime purpose, it is to sit down content with a little success.

Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton

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Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton
Worse
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More quotes by Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton

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Love thou, and if thy love be deep as mine, Thou wilt not laugh at poets.
Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton
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To the thinker, the most trifling external object often suggests ideas, which, like Homer's chain, extend, link after link, from earth to heaven.
Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton
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Success never needs an excuse.
Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton
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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
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The law is a gun, which if it misses a pigeon always kills a crow if it does not strike the guilty, it hits someone else. As every crime creates a law, so in turn every law creates a crime.
Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton
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There are two lives to each of us, the life of our actions, and the life of our minds and hearts. History reveals men's deeds and their outward characters, but not themselves. There is a secret self that has its own life, unpenetrated and unguessed.
Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton
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The easiest person to deceive is one's self.
Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton
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Death is the only monastery the tomb is the only cell, and the grave that adjoins the convent is the bitterest mock of its futility.
Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton
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I would rather have five energetic and competent enemies than one fool friend.
Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton
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Julius Caesar owed two millions when he risked the experiment of being general in Gaul. If Julius Caesar had not lived to cross the Rubicon, and pay off his debts, what would his creditors have called Julius Caesar?
Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton
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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!
Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton
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Fame 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, 1st Baron Lytton
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Nothing ages like laziness.
Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton
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A sense of contentment makes us kindly and benevolent to others we are not chafed and galled by cares which are tyrannical because original. We are fulfilling our proper destiny, and those around us feel the sunshine of our own hearts.
Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton
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Revenge is a common passion it is the sin of the uninstructed. The savage deems it noblebut 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
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The more a man desirous to pass at a value above his worth can contrast, by dignified silence, the garrulity of trivial minds, the more the world will give him credit for the wealth which he does not possess.
Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton
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Earnest men never think in vain, though their thoughts may be errors.
Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton
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There is one form of hope which is never unwise, and which certainly does not diminish with the increase of knowledge. In that form it changes its name, and we call it patience.
Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton
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They have written volumes out of which a couplet of verse, a period in prose, may cling to the rock of ages, as a shell that survives a deluge.
Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton
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There is no society, however free and democratic, where wealth will not create an aristocracy.
Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton