Walter Savage Landor Quotes

In the morn of life we are alert, we are heated in its noon, and only in its decline do we repose.

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

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.

Wherever there is excessive wealth, there is also in the train of it excessive poverty.

Ambition does not see the earth she treads on: The rock and the herbage are of one substance to her.

Every great writer is a writer of history, let him treat on almost what subject he may.

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

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.

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.

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

Every witticism is an inexact thought; that which is perfectly true is imperfectly witty.

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.

It often comes into my head That we may dream when we are dead, But I am far from sure we do. O that it were so! then my rest Would be indeed among the blest; I should for ever dream of you.

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

When we play the fool, how wideThe theatre expands! beside,How long the audience sits before us!How many prompters! what a chorus!

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

Those who in living fill the smallest space, In death have often left the greatest void.

A smile is ever the most bright and beautiful with a tear upon it. What is the dawn without the dew? The tear is rendered by the smile precious above the smile itself.

The sublime is contained in a grain of dust.

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.

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

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

Nature I loved, and next to Nature, Art.

Nations, like individuals, interest us in their growth.

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.

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

Kings play at war unfairly with republics; they can only lose some earth, and some creatures they value as little, while republics lose in every soldier a part of themselves.

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.

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

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

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.

Virtue is presupposed in friendship.

We may receive so much light as not to see, and so much philosophy as to be worse than foolish.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

What is reading but silent conversation.

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

There is no easy path leading out of life and few are the easy ones that lie within it.