Walter Savage Landor Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “The wise become as the unwise in the enchanted chambers of Power, whose lamps make every face the same colour.”

— Walter Savage Landor

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

— Walter Savage Landor

53. “No good writer was ever long neglected; no great man overlooked by men equally great. Impatience is a proof of inferior strength, and a destroyer of what little there may be.”

— Walter Savage Landor

54. “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

55. “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

56. “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

57. “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

58. “The damps of autumn sink into the leaves and prepare them for the necessity of their fall; and thus insensibly are we, as years close around us, detached from our tenacity of life by the gentle pressure of recorded sorrow.”

— Walter Savage Landor

59. “Shakespeare is not our poet, but the world’s.”

— Walter Savage Landor

60. “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

61. “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

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

— Walter Savage Landor

63. “What is reading but silent conversation?”

— Walter Savage Landor

64. “We fancy that our afflictions are sent us directly from above; sometimes we think it in piety and contrition, but oftener in moroseness and discontent.”

— Walter Savage Landor

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

— Walter Savage Landor

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

— Walter Savage Landor

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

— Walter Savage Landor

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

— Walter Savage Landor

69. “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

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

— Walter Savage Landor

71. “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

72. “I see the rainbow in the sky, the dew upon the grass; I see them, and I ask not why they glimmer or they pass. With folded arms I linger not to call them back; ’twere vain: In this, or in some other spot, I know they’ll shine again.”

— Walter Savage Landor

73. “If there were no falsehood in the world, there would be no doubt, if there were no doubt, there would be no inquiry; if no inquiry, no wisdom, no knowledge, no genius; and Fancy herself would lie muffled up in her robe, inactive, pale, and bloated.”

— Walter Savage Landor

74. “Patience, piety, and salutary knowledge spring up and ripen under the harrow of affliction; before there is wine or oil, the grape must be trodden and the oil pressed.”

— Walter Savage Landor

75. “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

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

— Walter Savage Landor

77. “There is no eloquence which does not agitate the soul.”

— Walter Savage Landor

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

— Walter Savage Landor

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

— Walter Savage Landor

80. “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.”

— Walter Savage Landor

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

— Walter Savage Landor

82. “We cannot be contented because we are happy, and we cannot be happy because we are contented.”

— Walter Savage Landor

83. “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

84. “We must distinguish between felicity and prosperity; for prosperity leads often to ambition, and ambition to disappointment; the course is then over, the wheel turns round but once, while the reaction of goodness and happiness is perpetual.”

— Walter Savage Landor

85. “Every great writer is a writer of history, let him treat on almost any subject he may.”

— Walter Savage Landor

86. “Truth, like the juice of the poppy, in small quantities, calms men; in larger, heats and irritates them, and is attended by fatal consequences in excess.”

— Walter Savage Landor

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

— Walter Savage Landor

88. “Friendship may sometimes step a few paces in advance of truth.”

— Walter Savage Landor

89. “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

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

— Walter Savage Landor

91. “A true philosopher is beyond the reach of fortune.”

— Walter Savage Landor

92. “Was genius ever ungrateful? Mere talents are dry leaves, tossed up and down by gusts of passion, and scattered and swept away; but, Genius lies on the bosom of Memory, and Gratitude at her feet.”

— Walter Savage Landor

93. “No thoroughly occupied person was ever found really miserable.”

— Walter Savage Landor

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

— Walter Savage Landor

95. “We listen to those whom we know to be of the same opinion as ourselves, and we call them wise for being of it; but we avoid such as differ from us.”

— Walter Savage Landor

96. “How sweet and sacred idleness is!”

— Walter Savage Landor

97. “There is a gravity which is not austere nor captious, which belongs not to melancholy nor dwells in contraction of heart: but arises from tenderness and hangs upon reflection.”

— Walter Savage Landor

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

— Walter Savage Landor

99. “A great man knows the value of greatness; he dares not hazard it, he will not squander it.”

— Walter Savage Landor

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

— Walter Savage Landor