Walter Savage Landor quotes:

+1
Share
Pin
Like
Send
Share
  • Study is the bane of childhood, the oil of youth, the indulgence of adulthood, and a restorative in old age.

  • The flame of anger, bright and brief, sharpens the barb of love.

  • No ashes are lighter than those of incense, and few things burn out sooner.

  • The wise become as the unwise in the enchanted chambers of Power, whose lamps make every face the same colour.

  • We often fancy that we suffer from ingratitude, while in reality we suffer from self-love.

  • Truth, like the juice of the poppy, in small quantities, calms men; in larger, heats and irritates them, and is attended by fatal consequences in excess.

  • Ambition has but one reward for all: A little power, a little transient fame; A grave to rest in, and a fading name!

  • Prose on certain occasions can bear a great deal of poetry; on the other hand, poetry sinks and swoons under a moderate weight of prose.

  • Music is God's gift to man, the only art of Heaven given to earth, the only art of earth we take to Heaven.

  • We think that we suffer from ingratitude, while in reality we suffer from self-love.

  • Every sect is a moral check on its neighbour. Competition is as wholesome in religion as in commerce.

  • Men, like nails, lose their usefulness when they lose their direction and begin to bend.

  • Even the weakest disputant is made so conceited by what he calls religion, as to think himself wiser than the wisest who thinks differently from him.

  • Truth is a point, the subtlest and finest; harder than adamant; never to be broken, worn away, or blunted. Its only bad quality is, that it is sure to hurt those who touch it; and likely to draw blood, perhaps the life blood, of those who press earnestly upon it.

  • There is no more certain sign of a narrow mind, of stupidity, and of arrogance, than to stand aloof from those who think differently from us.

  • The spirit of Greece, passing through and ascending above the world, hath so animated universal nature, that the very rocks and woods, the very torrents and wilds burst forth with it.

  • Those who are quite satisfied sit still and do nothing; those who are not quite satisfied are the sole benefactors of the world.

  • Little men build up great ones, but the snow colossus soon melts; the good stand under the eye of God, and therefore stand.

  • Cruelty is no more the cure of crimes than it is the cure of sufferings; compassion, in the first instance, is good for both; I have known it to bring compunction when nothing else would.

  • Modesty and diffidence make a man unfit for public affairs; they also make him unfit for brothels.

  • A man's vanity tells him what is honor, a man's conscience what is justice.

  • Heat and animosity, contest and conflict, may sharpen the wits, although they rarely do; they never strengthen the understanding, clear the perspicacity, guide the judgment, or improve the heart.

  • That which moveth the heart most is the best poetry; it comes nearest unto God, the source of all power.

  • The moderate are not usually the most sincere, for the same circumspection which makes them moderate makes them likewise retentive of what could give offence.

  • We fancy that our afflictions are sent us directly from above; sometimes we think it in piety and contrition, but oftener in moroseness and discontent.

  • Great men always pay deference to greater.

  • Whatever is worthy to be loved for anything is worthy of preservation. A wise and dispassionate legislator, if any such should ever arise among men, will not condemn to death him who has done or is likely to do more service than injury to society. Blocks and gibbets are the nearest objects with legislators, and their business is never with hopes or with virtues.

  • It is delightful to kiss the eyelashes of the beloved--is it not? But never so delightful as when fresh tears are on them.

  • No thoroughly occupied person was ever found really miserable.

  • Was genius ever ungrateful? Mere talents are dry leaves, tossed up and down by gusts of passion, and scattered and swept away; but, Genius lies on the bosom of Memory, and Gratitude at her feet.

  • Cats like men are flatterers.

  • Fleas know not whether they are upon the body of a giant or upon one of ordinary size.

  • A good cook is the peculiar gift of the gods. He must be a perfect creature from the brain to the palate, from the palate to the finger's end.

  • I would recommend a free commerce both of matter and mind. I would let men enter their own churches with the same freedom as their own houses; and I would do it without a homily or graciousness or favor, for tyranny itself is to me a word less odious than toleration.

  • Great men lose somewhat of their greatness by being near us; ordinary men gain much.

  • Not dancing well, I never danced at all--and how grievously has my heart ached when others where in the full enjoyment of that conversation which I had no right even to partake.

  • In honest truth, a name given to a man is no better than a skin given to him; what is not natively his own falls off and comes to nothing.

  • There is nothing on earth divine except humanity.

  • Such is our impatience, such our hatred of procrastination, to everything but the amendment of our practices and the adornment of our nature, one would imagine we were dragging Time along by force, and not he us.

  • Piety--warm, soft, and passive as the ether round the throne of Grace--is made callous and inactive by kneeling too much.

  • Everything that looks to the future elevates human nature; for never is life so low or so little as when occupied with the present.

  • Everything that looks to the future elevates human nature.

  • You should indeed have longer tarried By the roadside before you married.

  • But I have sinuous shells of pearly hue Within, and they that lustre have imbibed In the sun's palace-porch, where when unyoked chariot-wheel stands midway in the wave: Shake one, and it awakens; then apply Its polisht lips to your attentive ear, And it remembers its august abodes, And murmurs as the ocean murmurs there.

  • Of all failures, to fail in a witticism is the worst, and the mishap is the more calamitous in a drawn-out and detailed one

  • My thoughts are my company; I can bring them together, select them, detain them, dismiss them.

  • The habit of pleasing by flattery makes a language soft; the fear of offending by truth makes it circuitous and conventional.

  • I sometimes think that the most plaintive ditty has brought a fuller joy and of longer duration to its composer that the conquest of Persia to the Macedonian.

  • It appears to be among the laws of nature, that the mighty of intellect should be pursued and carped by the little, as the solitary flight of one great bird is followed by the twittering petulance of many smaller.

  • I strove with none; for none was worth my strife.

  • We cannot conquer fate and necessity, yet we can yield to them in such a manner as to be greater than if we could.

  • My thoughts are my company I can bring them together, select them, detain them, dismiss them

  • The writing of the wise are the only riches our posterity cannot squander.

  • Dying Speech of an Old PhilosopherI strove with none, for none was worth my strife.Nature I loved, and, next to Nature, Art:I warm'd both hands before the fire of life;It sinks; and I am ready to depart.

  • The damps of autumn sink into the leaves and prepare them for the necessity of their fall; and thus insensibly are we, as years close around us, detached from our tenacity of life by the gentle pressure of recorded sorrow.

  • When a cat flatters ... he is not insincere: you may safely take it for real kindness.

  • It is easy to look down on others; to look down on ourselves is the difficulty.

  • God scatters beauty as he scatters flowers O'er the wide earth, and tells us all are ours. A hundred lights in every temple burn, And at each shrine I bend my knee in turn.

  • The Siren waits thee, singing song for song.

  • Ambition is but avarice on stilts, and masked. God sometimes sends a famine, sometimes a pestilence, and sometimes a hero, for the chastisement of mankind; none of them surely for our admiration.

  • In argument, truth always prevails finally; in politics, falsehood always.

  • Religion is the eldest sister of philosophy: on whatever subjects they may differ, it is unbecoming in either to quarrel, and most so about their inheritance.

  • An ingenuous mind feels in unmerited praise the bitterest reproof. If you reject it you are unhappy, if you accept it you are undone.

  • Ambition is but avarice on stilts, and masked.

  • Many laws as certainly make bad men, as bad men make many laws.

  • An ingenuous mind feels in unmerited praise the bitterest reproof.

  • Even the weakest disputant is made so conceited by what he calls religion, as to think himself wiser than the wisest who think differently from him.

  • Kindness in ourselves is the honey that blunts the sting of unkindness in another.

  • We cannot be contented because we are happy, and we cannot be happy because we are contented.

  • There is no easy path leading out of life, and few easy ones that lie within it.

  • A critic is never too severe when he only detects the faults of an author. But he is worse than too severe when, in consequence of this detection, be presumes to place himself on a level with genius.

  • A great man knows the value of greatness; he dares not hazard it, he will not squander it.

  • A little praise is good for a shy temper; it teaches it to rely on the kindness of others.

  • A mercantile democracy may govern long and widely; a mercantile aristocracy cannot stand.

  • A smile is ever the most bright and beautiful with a tear upon it. What is the dawn without the dew? The tear is rendered by the smile precious above the smile itself.

  • A true philosopher is beyond the reach of fortune.

  • A wise man will always be a Christian, because the perfection of wisdom is to know where lies tranquillity of mind and how to attain it, which Christianity teaches.

  • Absurdities are great or small in proportion to custom or insuetude.

  • Ah what avails the sceptred race, Ah what the form divine! What every virtue, every grace! Rose Aylmer, all were thine. Rose Aylmer, whom these wakeful eyes May weep, but never see, A night of memories and of sighs I consecrate to thee.

  • All schools of philosophy, and almost all authors, are rather to be frequented for exercise than for weight.

  • Ambition does not see the earth she treads on: The rock and the herbage are of one substance to her.

  • An ingenious mind feels in unmerited praise the bitterest reproof.

  • And Modesty, who, when she goes, Is gone for ever.

  • Around the child bend all the threeSweet Graces: Faith, Hope, Charity.Around the man bend other faces;Pride, Envy, Malice, are his Graces.

  • As the pearl ripens in the obscurity of its shell, so ripens in the tomb all the fame that is truly precious.

  • As there are some flowers which you should smell but slightly to extract all that is pleasant in them ... so there are some men with whom a slight acquaintance is quite sufficient to draw out all that is agreeable; a more intimate one would be unsafe and unsatisfactory.

  • As we sometimes find one thing while we are looking for another, so, if truth escaped me, happiness and contentment fell in my way.

  • Authors are like cattle going to a fair: those of the same field can never move on without butting one another.

  • Avoid, which many grave men have not done, words taken from sacred subjects and from elevated poetry: these we have seen vilely prostituted. Avoid too the society of the barbarians who misemploy them.

  • Be assured that, although men of eminent genius have been guilty of all other vices, none worthy of more than a secondary name has ever been a gamester. Either an excess of avarice or a deficiency of what, in physics, is called excitability, is the cause of it; neither of which can exist in the same bosom with genius, with patriotism, or with virtue.

  • Belief in the future life is the appetite of reason.

  • Cats ask plainly for what they want.

  • Children are what the mothers are.

  • Circumstances form the character; but, like petrifying matters, they harden while they form.

  • Clear writers, like fountains, do not seem so deep as they are; the turbid look the most profound.

  • Consciousness of error is, to a certain extent, a consciousness of understanding; and correction of error is the plainest proof of energy and mastery.

  • Consult duty not events.

  • Contentment is better than divinations or visions.

  • Cruelty in all countries is the companion of anger; but there is only one, and never was another on the globe, where she coquets both with anger and mirth.

  • Cruelty is the highest pleasure to the cruel man; it is his love.

  • Cruelty, if we consider it as a crime, is the greatest of all; if we consider it as a madness, we are equally justifiable in applying to it the readiest and the surest means of oppression.

  • Death stands above me, whispering low I know not what into my ear; Of his strange language all I know Is, there is not a word of fear.

  • Delay in justice is injustice.

  • Democracy is always the work of kings. Ashes, which in themselves are sterile, fertilize the land they are cast upon.

  • Despotism sits nowhere so secure as under the effigy and ensigns of freedom.

  • Dignity, in private men and in governments, has been little else than a stately and stiff perseverance in oppression; and spirit, as it is called, little else than the foam of hard-mouthed insolence.

  • Do not expect to be acknowledged for what you are, much less for what you would be; since no one can well measure a great man but upon the bier.

  • Every good writer has much idiom; it is the life and spirit of language.

  • Every great writer is a writer of history, let him treat on almost any subject he may.

  • Every witticism is an inexact thought; that which is perfectly true is imperfectly witty.

  • Experience is our only teacher both in war and peace.

  • Falsehood is for a season.

  • Fame often rests at first upon something accidental, and often, too, is swept away, or for a time removed; but neither genius nor glory, is conferred at once, nor do they glimmer and fall, like drops in a grotto, at a shout.

  • Fame, they tell you, is air; but without air there is no life for any; without fame there is none for the best.

  • Fancy is imagination in her youth and adolescence. Fancy is always excursive; imagination, not seldom, is sedate.

  • Friendship is a vase, which, when it is flawed by heat, or violence, or accident, may as well be broken at once; it can never be trusted after.

  • Friendship may sometimes step a few paces in advance of truth.

  • Friendships are the purer and the more ardent, the nearer they come to the presence of God, the Sun not only of righteousness but of love.

  • God made the rose out of what was left of woman at the creation. The great difference is, we feel the rose's thorns when we gather it; and the other's when we have had it for some time.

  • Goodness does not more certainly make men happy than happiness makes them good.

+1
Share
Pin
Like
Send
Share