Walter Savage Landor Quotes

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.

Nothing is pleasanter to me than exploring in a library.

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.

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.

Cats, like men, are flatterers.

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

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

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.

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

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

I loved him not; and yet, now he is gone,
I feel I am alone.
I check'd him while he spoke; yet, could he speak,
Alas! I would not check.
For reasons not to love him once I sought,
And wearied all my thought
To vex myself and him: I now would give
My love could he but live
Who lately lived for me, and, when he found
'Twas vain, in holy ground
He hid his face amid the shades of death.
I waste for him my breath
Who wasted his for me! but mine returns,
And this lorn bosom burns
With stifling heat, heaving it up in sleep,
And waking me to weep
Tears that had melted his soft heart: for years
Wept he as bitter tears.
Merciful God! such was his latest prayer,
These may she never share.
Quieter is his breath, his breast more cold,
Than daisies in the mould,
Where children spell, athwart the churchyard gate,
His name and life's brief date.
Pray for him, gentle souls, whoe'er you be,
And oh! pray too for me!

The highest price we can pay for anything; is to ask it.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

No thoroughly occupied person was ever found really miserable.

I see the rainbow in the sky, the dew upon the grass; I see them, and I ask not why they glimmer or they pass. With folded arms I linger not to call them back; 'twere vain: In this, or in some other spot, I know they'll shine again.

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

Wisdom consisteth not in knowing many things, nor even in knowing them thoroughly; but in choosing and in following what conduces the most certainly to our lasting happiness and true glory.

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.

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.

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

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.

Wrong is but falsehood put in practice.

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.

Death stands above me,
Whispering low I know not what into my ear.

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.

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.

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

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

Two evils, of almost equal weight, may befall the man of erudition; never to be listened to, and to be listened to always.

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

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.

Falsehood is for a season.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

There is a gravity which is not austere nor captious, which belongs not to melancholy nor dwells in contraction of heart: but arises from tenderness and hangs upon reflection.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Teach him to live unto God and unto thee; and he will discover that women, like the plants in woods, derive their softness and tenderness from the shade.

The eyes of critics, whether in commending or carping, are both on one side, like a turbot's.

Where power is absent we may find the robe of genius, but we miss the throne.

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.

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.

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

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

O what a thing is age! Death without death's quiet.

Petulance is not wit, although a few grains of wit may be found in petulance; quartz is not gold, although a few grains of gold may be found in quartz.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

Consult duty not events.

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

This is the pleasantest part of life. Oblivion throws her light coverlet over our infancy; and, soon after we are out of the cradle we forget how soundly we had been slumbering, and how delightful were our dreams. Toil and pleasure contend for us almost the instant we rise from it: and weariness follows whichever has carried us away. We stop awhile, look around us, wonder to find we have completed the circle of existence, fold our arms, and fall asleep again.

If in argument we can make a man angry with us, we have drawn him from his vantage ground and overcome him.

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.

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

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.

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

What is reading but silent conversation.

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

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.

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

When a woman hath ceased to be quite the same to us, it matters little how different she becomes.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

Children are what the mothers are.

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

The worse of ingratitude lies not in the ossified heart of him who commits it, but we find it in the effect it produces on him against whom it was committed.

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

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

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

There is nothing on earth divine except humanity.

Experience is our only teacher both in war and peace.

We must not indulge in unfavorable views of mankind, since by doing it we make bad men believe they are no worse than others, and we teach the good that they are good in vain.

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.

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

Wise or unwise, who doubts for a moment that contentment is the cause of happiness? Yet the inverse is true: we are contented because we are happy, and not happy because we are contented. Well-regulated minds may be satisfied with a small portion of happiness; none can be happy with a small portion of content.