390 Quotes by Edward Bulwer-Lytton

Wrap thyself in the decent veil that the arts or the graces weave for thee, O human nature! It is only the statue of marble whose nakedness the eye can behold without shame and offence!

The object of ambition, unlike that of love, never being wholly possessed, ambition is the more durable passion of the two.

There is no man so great as not to have some littleness more predominant than all his greatness. Our virtues are the dupes, and often only the plaything of our follies.

Happiness and virtue rest upon each other; the best are not only the happiest, but the happiest are usually the best.

In other countries poverty is a misfortune – with us it is a crime.

Each man forms his duty according to his predominant characteristic; the stern require an avenging judge; the gentle, a forgiving father. Just so the pygmies declared that Jove himself was a pygmy.

Genius, the Pythian of the beautiful, leaves its large truths a riddle to the dull.

Of all the virtues necessary to the completion of the perfect man, there is none to be more delicately implied and less ostentatiously vaunted than that of exquisite feeling or universal benevolence.

In the hour of strait and need, we measure men’s stature not by the body, but the soul!