Walter Savage Landor - Imaginary Conversations

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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
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.

Walter Savage Landor
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.

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

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
Be assured that, although men of eminent genius have been guilty of all other vices, none worthy of more than a secondary name has ever been a gamester. Either an excess of avarice or a deficiency of what, in physics, is called excitability, is the cause of it; neither of which can exist in the same bosom with genius, with patriotism, or with virtue.

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

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

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

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

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

Walter Savage Landor
Men, like nails, lose their usefulness when they lose their direction and begin to bend: such nails are then thrown into the dust or into the furnace.

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

Walter Savage Landor
There is no eloquence which does not agitate the soul.

Walter Savage Landor
Wherever there is excessive wealth, there is also in the train of it excessive poverty; as, where the sun is brightest, the shade is deepest.

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

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

Walter Savage Landor
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
An ingenuous mind feels in unmerited praise the bitterest reproof. If you reject it you are unhappy, if you accept it you are undone.

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

Walter Savage Landor