Robert Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Earl of Lytton Quotes

Life hath set
No landmarks before us.

There is purpose in pain,
Otherwise it were devilish.

We are our own fates. Our deeds
Are our doomsmen. Man's life was made not for men's creeds,
But men's actions.

To all facts there are laws.
The effect has its cause, and I mount to the cause.

In life there are meetings which seem
Like a fate.

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

Do not think that years leave us and find us the same!

Those true eyes
Too pure and too honest in aught to disguise
The sweet soul shining through them.

No true love can be without
Its dread penalty—jealousy.

You know
There are moments when silence, prolong'd and unbroken,
More expressive may be than all words ever spoken.

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

When life leaps in the veins, when it beats in the heart,
When it thrills as it fills every animate part,
Where lurks it? How works it?.. we scarcely detect it.

Rest is sweet after strife.

We are what we must,
And not what we would be. I know that one hour
Forestalls not another. The will and the power
Are diverse.

'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.