Cookies help us deliver our services. By using our services, you agree to our use of cookies. Find out more
Saturday, January 04, 2025 Text is available under the CC BY-SA 3.0 licence.

Edward Bulwer-Lytton (1803 – 1873)


English novelist, playwright, and politician.
Beneath the rule of men entirely great,
The pen is mightier than the sword.
It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents — except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness.
Bulwer-Lytton I agree | disagree
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.




Rank is a great beautifier.
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.
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!
No weapon that slays
Its victim so surely (if well aimed) as praise.
Every man has his price,
I will bribe left and right.
Bulwer-Lytton I agree | disagree
The brilliant chief, irregularly great,
Frank, haughty, rash,— the Rupert of debate!
The man who smokes, thinks like a sage and acts like a Samaritan.
My father died shortly after I was twenty-one; and being left well off, and having a taste for travel and adventure, I resigned, for a time, all pursuit of the almighty dollar, and became a desultory wanderer over the face of the earth.




Buy my flowers,—oh buy, I pray!
The blind girl comes from afar.
In the lexicon of youth, which fate reserves
For a bright manhood, there is no such word
As "fail".
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."
You speak
As one who fed on poetry.
Ambition has no risk.
Truth makes on the surface of nature no one track of light — every eye looking on finds its own.
Take away the sword;
States can be saved without it.
Memory, no less than hope, owes its charm to “the far away.”
The easiest person to deceive is one’s own self.


© 2009–2013Quotes Privacy Policy | Contact