Walter Savage Landor Quotations

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.

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 is but avarice on stilts, and masked.

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

The Siren waits thee, singing song for song.

We are no longer happy so soon as we wish to be happier.

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

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

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

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

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

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

We talk on principal, but act on motivation.

Study is the bane of childhood, the oil of youth, the indulgence of adulthood, and a restorative in old age.

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

There is nothing on earth divine except humanity.

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

No thoroughly occupied person was ever found really miserable.

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.

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

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

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

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

There is delight in singing, though none hear beside the singer.

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

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

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.

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

An ingenuous mind feels in unmerited praise the bitterest reproof.

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

The most pernicious of absurdities is that weak, blind, stupid faith is better than the constant practice of every human virtue.

Ridicule has followed the vestiges of truth, but never usurped her place.

Experience is our only teacher both in war and peace.

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

When the mind loses its feeling for elegance, it grows corrupt and groveling, and seeks in the crowd what ought to be found at home.

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

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

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, 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.

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

It is as wise to moderate our belief as our desires.

Children are what the mothers are.

Falsehood is for a season.

The happy never say, and never hear said, farewell.

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.

The religion of Christ is peace and good-will,--the religion of Christendom is war and ill-will.

There are proud men of so much delicacy that it almost conceals their pride, and perfectly excuses it.

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

Politeness is not always a sign of wisdom; but the want of it always leaves room for a suspicion of folly, if folly and imprudence are the same.

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.

Nations, like individuals, interest us in their growth.

Moroseness is the evening of turbulence.

Merit has rarely risen of itself, but a pebble or a twig is often quite sufficient for it to spring from to the highest ascent. There is usually some baseness before there is any elevation.

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.

Of all studies, the most delightful and the most useful is biography. The seeds of great events lie near the surface; historians delve too deep for them. No history was ever true. Lives I have read which, if they were not, had the appearance, the interest, and the utility of truth.

No good writer was ever long neglected; no great man overlooked by men equally great. Impatience is a proof of inferior strength, and a destroyer of what little there may be.

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.

There is only one word of tenderness we could say, which we have not said oftentimes before ; and there is no consolation in it. The happy never say, and never hear said, farewell.

Other offences, even the greatest, are the violation of one law: despotism is the violation of all.

To my ninth decade I have totter'd on, And no soft arm bends now my steps to steady; She, who once led me where she would, is gone, So when he calls me, Death shall find me ready.

Patience, piety, and salutary knowledge spring up and ripen under the harrow of affliction; before there is wine or oil, the grape must be trodden and the oil pressed.

Let a gentleman be known to have been cheated of twenty pounds, and it costs him forty a-year for the remainder of his life.

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

Life is but sighs; and, when they cease, 'tis over.

I delight in the diffusion of learning; yet, I must confess it, I am most gratified and transported at finding a large quantity of it in one place; just as I would rather have a solid pat of butter at breakfast, than a splash of grease upon the table-cloth that covers half of it.

Happiness, like air and water, the other two great requisites of life, is composite. One kind of it suits one man, another kind another. The elevated mind takes in and breathes out again that which would be uncongenial to the baser; and the baser draws life and enjoyment from that which would be putridity to the loftier.

I have suffered more from my bad dancing than from all the misfortunes and miseries of my life put together.

The very beautiful rarely love at all; those precious images are placed above the reach of the passions: Time alone is permitted to efface them.

Why cannot we be delighted with an author, and even feel a predilection for him, without a dislike of others? An admiration of Catullus or Virgil, of Tibullus or Ovid, is never to be heightened by a discharge of bile on Horace.

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

States, like men, have their growth, their manhood, their decrepitude, their decay.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

When we play the fool, how wideThe theatre expands! beside,How long the audience sits before us!How many prompters! what a chorus!

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

How delightful it is to see a friend after a length of absence! How delightful to chide him for that length of absence to which we owe such delight.

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.

O Music! how it grieves me that imprudence, intemperance, gluttony, should open their channels into thy sacred stream.

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

The happiest of pillows is not that which love first presses! it is that which death has frowned on and passed over.

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.

Contentment is better than divinations or visions.

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

Something of the severe hath always been appertaining to order and to grace; and the beauty that is not too liberal is sought the most ardently, and loved the longest.

We must distinguish between felicity and prosperity; for prosperity leads often to ambition, and ambition to disappointment; the course is then over, the wheel turns round but once, while the reaction of goodness and happiness is perpetual.

He who brings ridicule to bear against truth finds in his hand a blade without a hilt. The most sparkling and pointed flame of wit flickers and expires against the incombustible walls of her sanctuary.

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.

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.

He who first praises a book becomingly is next in merit to the author.

The sweetest souls, like the sweetest flowers, soon canker in cities, and no purity is rarer there than the purity of delight.

Those who speak against the great do not usually speak from morality, but from envy.

A true philosopher is beyond the reach of fortune.

Belief in the future life is the appetite of reason.

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.

Wrong is but falsehood put in practice.