Robert Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Earl of Lytton Quotes

We gain
Justice, judgment, with years, or else years are in vain.

The world is a nettle; disturb it, it stings.
Grasp it firmly, it stings not.

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?

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

Let any man show the world that he feels
Afraid of its bark and ’t will fly at his heels:
Let him fearlessly face it, ’t will leave him alone:
But ’t will fawn at his feet if he flings it a bone.

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.

Words, however, are things: and the man who accords
To his language the license to outrage his soul
Is controll'd by the words he disdains to control.

The ages roll
Forward; and, forward with them, draw my soul Into Time’s infinite sea.
And to be glad or sad I care no more:
But to have done, and to have been, before I cease to do and be!

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.

In the lives of most women and men
There's a moment when all would go smooth and even,
If only the dead could find out when
To come back and be forgiven.

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.

And the jasmin-flower in her fair young breast:
(O the faint, sweet smell of that jasmin-flower!)
And the one bird singing alone in his nest:
And the one star over the tower.

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.

Oh, moment of sweet peril, perilous sweet!
When woman joins herself to man.

The unknown
Is life to love, religion, poetry.