Edward Bulwer LyttonThinkers

Ambition is more durable than love because its object is never wholly possessed.

Art is essentially ethical; because every true work of art most have a beauty or grandeur of some kind, and beauty and grandeur cannot be comprehended by the beholder except through the moral Bentiment. The eye is only a witness ; it is not a judge. The mind judges what the eye reports to it; therefore, whatever elevates the moral sentiment to the contemplation of beauty and grandeur is in itself ethical.

Art is the effort of man to express the ideas which nature suggests to him of a power above nature, whether that power be within the recesses of his own being, or in the Great First Cause of which nature, like himself, is but the effect.

Character is money; and according as the man earns or spends the money, money in turn becomes character. As money is the most evident power in the world’s uses, so the use that he makes of money is often all that the world knows about a man.

A Cigar is as great a comfort to a man as a good cry to a woman.

Common sense is only a modification of talent. Genius is an exaltation of it: the difference is, therefore, in tha degree, not nature.

Death is the only monastery; the tomb is the only cell, and the grave that adjoins the convent is the bitterest mock of its futility.

Debt is to man what the serpent is to the bird; its eye fascinates, its breath poisons, its coil crushes sinew and bone, its jaw is the pitiless grave.

Despair makes victims sometimes victors.

Despair is free.

Earnestness is the best gift of mental power, and deficiency of heart is the cause of many men never becoming great.

Expression is the mystery of beauty.