Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton, fully Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer-Lytton, Lord Lytton

When people have no other tyrant, their own public opinion becomes one.

When a person is down in the world, an ounce of help is better than a pound of preaching.

Toil to some is happiness, and rest to others. This man can only breathe in crowds, and that man only in solitudes.

To judge human character rightly, a man may sometimes have very small experience, provided he has a very large heart.

To be happy you must forget yourself. Learn benevolence; it is the only cure of a morbid temper.

There is an ill-breeding to which, whatever our rank and nature, we are almost equally sensitive, the ill-breeding that comes from want of consideration for others.

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.

The vices and the virtues are written in a language the world cannot construe; it reads them in a vile translation, and the translators are Failure and Success.

The curse of the great is ennui.

The bliss that can be told is but half-bliss.

Strive, while improving your one talent, to enrich your whole capital as a man. It is in this way that you escape from the wretched narrow-mindedness which is the characteristic of every one who cultivates his specialty alone.

Sooner mayest thou trust thy pocket to a pickpocket than give loyal friendship to the man who boasts of eyes to which the heart never mounts in dew! Only when man weeps he should be alone, not because tars are weak, but they should be secret. Tears are akin to prayer - Pharisees parade prayers, impostors parade tears.

Self-confidence is not hope; it is the self-judgment of your own internal forces in their relation to the world without, which results from the failure of many; hopes and the non-realization of many fears.

Remorse is the echo of a lost virtue.

Rarest of all things on earth is the union in which both, by their contrasts, make harmonious their blending; each supplying the defects of the helpmate, and completing, by fusion, one strong human soul.

Punctuality is the stern virtue of men of business, and the graceful courtesy of princes.

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.

Of all the signs of a corrupt heart and a feeble head, the tendency of incredulity is the surest. Real philosophers seeks rather to solve than to deny.

Of all the agonies in life, that which is most poignant and harrowing; that which for the time annihilates reason, and leave our whole organization one lacerated, mangled heart, is the conviction that we have been deceived where we placed all the trust of love.

Nothing conveys a more inaccurate idea of a whole truth than a part of a truth so prominently brought forth as to throw the other parts into shadow. This is the art of caricature.

Not in the knowledge of things without, but in the perfection of the soul within, lies the empire of man aspiring to be more than man.

Nobody loves heartily unless people take pains to prevent it.

No task is more difficult than systematic hypocrisy.

Men are valued, not for what they are, but for what they seem to be.

Man must be disappointed with the lesser things in life before he can comprehend the full value of the greater.