Top 100 Walter Savage Landor Quotes
#1. We listen to those whom we know to be of the same opinion as ourselves, and we call them wise for being of it; but we avoid such as differ from us.
Walter Savage Landor
#2. 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.
Walter Savage Landor
#3. Old trees in their living state are the only things that money cannot command.
Walter Savage Landor
#5. Those who speak against the great do not usually speak from morality, but from envy.
Walter Savage Landor
#8. 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.
Walter Savage Landor
#9. 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.
Walter Savage Landor
#10. Men universally are ungrateful towards him who instructs them, unless, in the hours or in the intervals of instruction, he presents a sweet-cake to their self-love.
Walter Savage Landor
#11. 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.
Walter Savage Landor
#12. We often fancy that we suffer from ingratitude, while in reality we suffer from self-love.
Walter Savage Landor
#14. 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.
Walter Savage Landor
#15. 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.
Walter Savage Landor
#16. Fleas know not whether they are upon the body of a giant or upon one of ordinary size.
Walter Savage Landor
#17. The only effect of public punishment is to show the rabble how bravely it can be borne; and that every one who hath lost a toe-nail hath suffered worse.
Walter Savage Landor
#18. 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.
Walter Savage Landor
#19. 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.
Walter Savage Landor
#20. 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.
Walter Savage Landor
#22. 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.
Walter Savage Landor
#23. It often comes into my head That we may dream when we are dead, But I am far from sure we do. O that it were so! then my rest Would be indeed among the blest; I should for ever dream of you.
Walter Savage Landor
#24. 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.
Walter Savage Landor
#26. 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.
Walter Savage Landor
#27. 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.
Walter Savage Landor
#28. 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
Walter Savage Landor
#29. The sweetest souls, like the sweetest flowers, soon canker in cities, and no purity is rarer there than the purity of delight.
Walter Savage Landor
#30. The most pernicious of absurdities is that weak, blind, stupid faith is better than the constant practice of every human virtue.
Walter Savage Landor
#31. 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.
Walter Savage Landor
#34. 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.
Walter Savage Landor
#35. I never did a single wise thing in the whole course of my existence, although I have written many which have been thought so.
Walter Savage Landor
#36. No truer word, save God's, was ever spoken,
Than that the largest heart is soonest broken.
Walter Savage Landor
#37. 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.
Walter Savage Landor
#38. Next in criminality to him who violates the laws of his country, is he who violates the language.
Walter Savage Landor
#39. 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.
Walter Savage Landor
#40. What is companionship where nothing that improves the intellect is communicated, and where the larger heart contracts itself to the model and dimension of the smaller?
Walter Savage Landor
#41. No friendship is so cordial or so delicious as that of girl for girl; no hatred so intense and immovable as that of woman for woman.
Walter Savage Landor
#45. 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.
Walter Savage Landor
#46. There are proud men of so much delicacy that it almost conceals their pride, and perfectly excuses it.
Walter Savage Landor
#47. I have since written what no tide
Shall ever wash away, what men
Unborn shall read o'er ocean wide
And find Ianthe's name agen.
Walter Savage Landor
#50. Despotism sits nowhere so secure as under the effigy and ensigns of freedom.
Walter Savage Landor
#51. We are poor, indeed, when we have no half-wishes left us. The heart and the imagination close the shutters the instant they are gone.
Walter Savage Landor
#54. A mercantile democracy may govern long and widely; a mercantile aristocracy cannot stand.
Walter Savage Landor
#56. We may receive so much light as not to see, and so much philosophy as to be worse than foolish.
Walter Savage Landor
#58. The wise become as the unwise in the enchanted chambers of Power, whose lamps make every face the same colour.
Walter Savage Landor
#60. Great men too often have greater faults than little men can find room for.
Walter Savage Landor
#61. The eyes of critics, whether in commending or carping, are both on one side, like a turbot's.
Walter Savage Landor
#62. In argument, truth always prevails finally; in politics, falsehood always.
Walter Savage Landor
#63. 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.
Walter Savage Landor
#64. All schools of philosophy, and almost all authors, are rather to be frequented for exercise than for weight.
Walter Savage Landor
#65. Where power is absent we may find the robe of genius, but we miss the throne.
Walter Savage Landor
#66. My thoughts are my company; I can bring them together, select them, detain them, dismiss them.
Walter Savage Landor
#68. The habit of pleasing by flattery makes a language soft; the fear of offending by truth makes it circuitous and conventional.
Walter Savage Landor
#69. A little praise is good for a shy temper; it teaches it to rely on the kindness of others.
Walter Savage Landor
#71. That which moveth the heart most is the best poetry; it comes nearest unto God, the source of all power.
Walter Savage Landor
#72. 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.
Walter Savage Landor
#73. Men, like nails, lose their usefulness when they lose their direction and begin to bend.
Walter Savage Landor
#75. 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.
Walter Savage Landor
#76. The heart that once has been bathed in love's pure fountain retains the pulse of youth forever.
Walter Savage Landor
#78. Every great writer is a writer of history, let him treat on almost any subject he may.
Walter Savage Landor
#79. 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.
Walter Savage Landor
#80. Study is the bane of childhood, the oil of youth, the indulgence of adulthood, and a restorative in old age.
Walter Savage Landor
#81. 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.
Walter Savage Landor
#83. 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.
Walter Savage Landor
#84. When we play the fool, how wideThe theatre expands! beside,How long the audience sits before us!How many prompters! what a chorus!
Walter Savage Landor
#85. 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.
Walter Savage Landor
#86. Kings play at war unfairly with republics; they can only lose some earth, and some creatures they value as little, while republics lose in every soldier a part of themselves.
Walter Savage Landor
#87. When a woman hath ceased to be quite the same to us, it matters little how different she becomes.
Walter Savage Landor
#88. I warmed both hands before the fire of life; It sinks, and I am ready to depart.
Walter Savage Landor
#89. When a cat flatters ... he is not insincere: you may safely take it for real kindness.
Walter Savage Landor
#91. No ashes are lighter than those of incense, and few things burn out sooner.
Walter Savage Landor
#92. Two evils, of almost equal weight, may befall the man of erudition; never to be listened to, and to be listened to always.
Walter Savage Landor
#93. 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.
Walter Savage Landor
#94. 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.
Walter Savage Landor
#95. 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.
Walter Savage Landor
#97. In the morn of life we are alert, we are heated in its noon, and only in its decline do we repose.
Walter Savage Landor
#98. 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.
Walter Savage Landor
#100. We care not how many see us in choler, when we rave and bluster, and make as much noise and bustle as we can; but if the kindest and most generous affection comes across us, we suppress every sign of it, and hide ourselves in nooks and covert.
Walter Savage Landor
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