Leadership Quote by Edward G. Bulwer-Lytton

Triumph, Bulwer-Lytton suggests, is public property; sorrow remains private jurisdiction. The line turns on a social asymmetry that still feels unnervingly current: success wants witnesses, while pain fears them. “Crowds” isn’t just a neutral audience. It implies judgment, appetite, spectacle - the public as a marketplace where victories can be traded for status. By contrast, “our own hearts” is a solitary courtroom, the only space where grief can be admitted without cross-examination.

The sentence works because it flatters and indicts at once. On the surface, it sounds like a humane observation about vulnerability. Underneath, it’s a critique of performance: we broadcast the parts of our lives that can be converted into approval, and we quarantine the parts that might cost us it. That’s not merely shyness; it’s self-preservation inside a culture that treats misfortune as either weakness or entertainment.

Bulwer-Lytton’s context matters. As a Victorian politician and public man, he lived inside reputational machinery - Parliament, newspapers, salons - where narrative discipline was survival. A “triumph” can be framed, deployed, made useful. A “sorrow” is messy, ungovernable, likely to be weaponized by rivals or misread by allies. The phrasing also carries a faint moral chill: if the heart is the “sole confidant,” then isolation becomes the default condition of suffering, not an accident.

It’s a compact sociology of disclosure: publicity rewards the curated self, while the private self absorbs what can’t be made palatable.