Walter Savage Landor Quotes

165 Sourced Quotes

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

Walter Savage Landor
We enter our studies, and enjoy a society which we alone can bring together. We raise no jealousy by conversing with one in preference to another; we give no offence to the most illustrious by questioning him as long as we will, and leaving him as abruptly. Diversity of opinion raises no tumult in our presence: each interlocutor stands before us, speaks or is silent, and we adjourn or decide the business at our leisure.

Walter Savage Landor
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
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.

Walter Savage Landor
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.

Walter Savage Landor
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
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.

Walter Savage Landor
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
The tomb is the pedestal of greatness. I make a distinction between God's great and the king's great.

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

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

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

Walter Savage Landor
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.

Walter Savage Landor
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.

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

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

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

Walter Savage Landor
Political men, like goats, usually thrive best among inequalities.

Walter Savage Landor
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.

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

Walter Savage Landor
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.

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

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

Walter Savage Landor
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