Lew Wallace
Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ, published in 1880, is a novel written by Lew Wallace in the English language.
Wallace was born on April 10, 1827, in Brookville, and over the course of his life he took on a remarkable range of roles. He worked as a lawyer and a journalist, served as a military officer, and rose to the rank of general in the Union Army during the American Civil War. After the war, his career continued to expand in different directions. He served as governor of the New Mexico Territory and later worked as an ambassador and diplomat. Alongside these public commitments, he remained active as a writer — producing poetry and prose and working in an autobiographical mode as well as fiction.
Wallace died on February 15, 1905, in Crawfordsville. He had been, across his lifetime, a lawyer, a soldier, a politician, a jurist, a journalist, a poet, a novelist, and a diplomat — and Ben-Hur, the novel he published in 1880, remains the concrete literary work that came out of that long and varied career.
Quotes by Lew Wallace
As a rule, he fights well who has wrongs to redress; but vastly better fights he who, with wrongs as a spur, has also steadily before him a glorious result in prospect – a result in which he can discern balm for wounds, compensation for valor, remembrance and gratitude in the event of death.
Men speak of dreaming as if it were a phenomenon of night and sleep. They should know better. All results achieved by us are self-promised, and all self-promises are made in dreams awake. Dreaming is the relief of labor, the wine that sustains us in act. We learn to love labor, not for itself, but for the opportunity it furnishes for dreaming, which is the great under-monotone of real life, unheard, unnoticed, because of its constancy. Living is dreaming. Only in the grave are there no dreams.
A man can carry his mind with him as he carries his watch; but like the watch, to keep it going he must keep it wound up. Of.
A word as to the pleasure there is in the thought of a Soul in each of us. In the first place, it robs death of its terrors by making dying a change for the better, and burial but the planting of a seed from which there will spring a new life.
The architect had not stopped to bother about columns and porticos, proportions or interiors, or any limitation upon the epic he sought to materialize; he had simply made a servant of Nature – art can go no further.
Heaven may be won, not by the sword, not by human wisdom, but by Faith, Love, and Good Works.
To begin a reform, go not into the places of the great and rich; go rather to those whose cups of happiness are empty – to the poor and humble.
