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.

An ingenious mind feels in unmerited praise the bitterest reproof.

Life and death appear more certainly ours than whatsoever else; and yet hardly can that be called ours, which comes without our knowledge, and goes without it.

True wit, to every man, is that which falls on another.

Next in criminality to him who violates the laws of his country, is he who violates the language.

The heart that once has been bathed in love's pure fountain retains the pulse of youth forever.

If there were no falsehood in the world, there would be no doubt, if there were no doubt, there would be no inquiry; if no inquiry, no wisdom, no knowledge, no genius; and Fancy herself would lie muffled up in her robe, inactive, pale, and bloated.

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

The vain poet is of the opinion that nothing of his can be too much: he sends to you basketful after basketful of juiceless fruit, covered with scentless flowers.

There is a desire of property in the sanest and best men, which Nature seems to have implanted as conservative of her works, and which is necessary to encourage and keep alive the arts.

The deafest man can hear praise, and is slow to think any an excess.

We cannot at once catch the applauses of the vulgar and expect the approbation of the wise.

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

The present, like a note in music, is nothing but as it appertains to what is past and what is to come.

The assailant is often in the right; the assailed is always.

We oftener say things because we can say them well, than because they are sound and reasonable.

It has been my fortune to love in general those men most who have thought most differently from me, on subjects wherein others pardon no discordance. I think I have no more right to be angry with a man, whose reason has followed up a process different from what mine has, and is satisfied with the result, than with one who has gone to Venice while I am at Siena, and who writes to me that he likes the place.

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.

Tyrants never perish from tyranny, but always from folly,-when their fantasies have built up a palace for which the earth has no foundation.

I hate false words, and seek with care, difficulty, and moroseness, those that fit the thing.

Hope is the mother of faith.

Great men too often have greater faults than little men can find room for.

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.

Those who in living fill the smallest space, In death have often left the greatest void.

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

We may receive so much light as not to see, and so much philosophy as to be worse than foolish.

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

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

Wrong is but falsehood put in practice.

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.

Belief in the future life is the appetite of reason.

A true philosopher is beyond the reach of fortune.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Contentment is better than divinations or visions.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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 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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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