Walter Savage Landor quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Walter Savage Landor

Walter Savage Landor Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Walter Savage Landor on Wise Famous Quotes.

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

There is no eloquence which does not agitate the soul.

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

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

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

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.

Truth sometimes corner unawares upon Caution, and sometimes speaks in public as unconsciously as in a dream.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

Nothing is pleasanter to me than exploring in a library.

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

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

The Siren waits thee, singing song for song.

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

Experience is our only teacher both in war and peace.

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

Consult duty not events.

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

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.

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

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.

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

Virtue is presupposed in friendship.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hope is the mother of faith.

I warmed both hands before the fire of life; It sinks, and I am ready to depart.

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

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

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

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

Belief in the future life is the appetite of reason.

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

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.

How sweet and sacred idleness is!

Principles do not mainly influence even the principled; we talk on principle, but we act on interest.

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.

An ingenuous mind feels in unmerited praise the bitterest reproof.

Cats ask plainly for what they want.

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

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

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

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

Political men, like goats, usually thrive best among inequalities.

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

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

Cats, like men, are flatterers.

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.

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

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

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

No truer word, save God's, was ever spoken,
Than that the largest heart is soonest broken.

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

Ambition is but avarice on stilts, and masked.

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

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

What is reading but silent conversation.

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

Children are what the mothers are.

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

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

Falsehood is for a season.

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

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

I never did a single wise thing in the whole course of my existence, although I have written many which have been thought so.

Wrong is but falsehood put in practice.

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

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

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

Justice is often pale and melancholy; but Gratitude, her daughter, is constantly in the flow of spirits and the bloom of loveliness.

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.

Contentment is better than divinations or visions.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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