Walter Savage Landor Quotes

165 Sourced Quotes

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
Merit has rarely risen of itself, but a pebble or a twig is often quite sufficient for it to spring from to the highest ascent. There is usually some baseness before there is any elevation.

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

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

Walter Savage Landor
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
There is only one word of tenderness we could say, which we have not said oftentimes before ; and there is no consolation in it. The happy never say, and never hear said, farewell.

Walter Savage Landor
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
There are proud men of so much delicacy that it almost conceals their pride, and perfectly excuses it.

Walter Savage Landor
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.

Walter Savage Landor
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
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
Harmonious words render ordinary ideas acceptable; less ordinary, pleasant; novel and ingenious ones, delightful. As pictures and statues, and living beauty, too, show better by music-light, so is poetry irradiated, vivified, glorified', and raised into immortal life by harmony.

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

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

Walter Savage Landor
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.

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

Walter Savage Landor
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.

Walter Savage Landor
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
Whatever is worthy to be loved for anything is worthy of preservation. A wise and dispassionate legislator, if any such should ever arise among men, will not condemn to death him who has done or is likely to do more service than injury to society. Blocks and gibbets are the nearest objects with legislators, and their business is never with hopes or with virtues.

Walter Savage Landor
Let me take up your metaphor. 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. The more graceful and ornamental it was, the more clearly do we discern the hopelessness of restoring it to its former state. Coarse stones, if they are fractured, may be cemented again; precious stones, never.

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

Walter Savage Landor
It appears to be among the laws of nature, that the mighty of intellect should be pursued and carped by the little, as the solitary flight of one great bird is followed by the twittering petulance of many smaller.

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