Robert Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Earl of Lytton Quotes

Who seeks for aid
Must show how service sought can be repaid.

The world is fill'd with folly and sin, And Love must cling where it can, I say:
For Beauty is easy enough to win; But one isn't loved every day.

Far up the wave
The clouds that lay piled in the golden heat
Were turn'd into types of the ancient mountains
In an ancient land.

'Tis more brave
To live, than to die.

There's no weapon that slays
Its victim so surely (if well aim'd) as praise.

'Twas a hand
White, delicate, dimpled, warm, languid, and bland.
The hand of a woman is often, in youth, Somewhat rough, somewhat red, somewhat graceless in truth;
Does its beauty refine, as its pulses grow calm,
Or as sorrow has cross'd the life-line in its palm.

We may live without poetry, music and art;
We may live without conscience and live without heart;
We may live without friends; we may live without books;
But civilized man can not live without cooks.
He may live without books,—what is knowledge but grieving?
He may live without hope—what is hope but deceiving?
He may live without love,—what is passion but pining?
But where is the man that can live without dining?

There is a pleasure which is born of pain.

Genius does what it must, and Talent does what it can.

The man who seeks one thing in life and but one
May hope to achieve it before life is done;
But he who seeks all things, wherever he goes
Only reaps from the hopes which around him he sows
A harvest of barren regrets.

Whene'er I hear French spoken as I approve,
I feel myself quietly falling in love.

A night of tears! for the gusty rain
Had ceased, but the eaves were dripping yet;
And the moon look'd forth, as tho' in pain,
With her face al white and wet.

Ah, well! when time is flown, how it fled
It is better neither to ask nor tell.
Leave the dead moments to bury their dead.

Who can undo
What time hath done? who can win back the wind?
Beckon lost music from a broken lute?
Renew the redness of a last year's rose?
Or dig the sunken sunset from the deep?

Alas! must it be ever so?
Do we stand in our own light, wherever we go,
And fight our own shadows forever?