Top 200 Walter Savage Landor Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “A great man knows the value of greatness; he dares not hazard it, he will not squander it.”

— Walter Savage Landor

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

— Walter Savage Landor

103. “Greatness, as we daily see it, is unsociable.”

— Walter Savage Landor

104. “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.”

— Walter Savage Landor

105. “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

106. “Belief in the future life is the appetite of reason.”

— Walter Savage Landor

107. “Petulance is not wit, although a few grains of wit may be found in petulance; quartz is not gold, although a few grains of gold may be found in quartz.”

— Walter Savage Landor

108. “Old trees in their living state are the only things that money cannot command.”

— Walter Savage Landor

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

— Walter Savage Landor

110. “Men, like nails, lose their usefulness when they lose their direction and begin to bend.”

— Walter Savage Landor

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

— Walter Savage Landor

112. “The writing of the wise are the only riches our posterity cannot squander.”

— Walter Savage Landor

113. “Fame, they tell you, is air; but without air there is no life for any; without fame there is none for the best.”

— Walter Savage Landor

114. “The most pernicious of absurdities is that weak, blind, stupid faith is better than the constant practice of every human virtue.”

— Walter Savage Landor

115. “States, like men, have their growth, their manhood, their decrepitude, their decay.”

— Walter Savage Landor

116. “Life is but sighs; and, when they cease, ’tis over.”

— Walter Savage Landor

117. “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

118. “Cats like men are flatterers.”

— Walter Savage Landor

119. “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

120. “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

121. “A little praise is good for a shy temper; it teaches it to rely on the kindness of others.”

— Walter Savage Landor

122. “Not dancing well, I never danced at all – and how grievously has my heart ached when others where in the full enjoyment of that conversation which I had no right even to partake.”

— Walter Savage Landor

123. “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

124. “Immoderate power, like other intemperance, leaves the progeny weaker and weaker, until nature as in compassion covers it with her mantle and it is seen no more.”

— Walter Savage Landor

125. “The foundation of domestic happiness is faith in the virtue of woman.”

— Walter Savage Landor

126. “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

127. “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

128. “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

129. “Every sect is a moral check on its neighbour. Competition is as wholesome in religion as in commerce.”

— Walter Savage Landor

130. “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

131. “Virtue is presupposed in friendship.”

— Walter Savage Landor

132. “You should indeed have longer tarried By the roadside before you married.”

— Walter Savage Landor

133. “Absurdities are great or small in proportion to custom or insuetude.”

— Walter Savage Landor

134. “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.”

— Walter Savage Landor

135. “It is as wise to moderate our belief as our desires.”

— Walter Savage Landor

136. “A critic is never too severe when he only detects the faults of an author. But he is worse than too severe when, in consequence of this detection, be presumes to place himself on a level with genius.”

— Walter Savage Landor

137. “Wrong is but falsehood put in practice.”

— Walter Savage Landor

138. “Democracy is always the work of kings. Ashes, which in themselves are sterile, fertilize the land they are cast upon.”

— Walter Savage Landor

139. “Heat and animosity, contest and conflict, may sharpen the wits, although they rarely do; they never strengthen the understanding, clear the perspicacity, guide the judgment, or improve the heart.”

— Walter Savage Landor

140. “There is a vast deal of vital air in loving words.”

— Walter Savage Landor

141. “Dignity, in private men and in governments, has been little else than a stately and stiff perseverance in oppression; and spirit, as it is called, little else than the foam of hard-mouthed insolence.”

— Walter Savage Landor

142. “Something of the severe hath always been appertaining to order and to grace; and the beauty that is not too liberal is sought the most ardently, and loved the longest.”

— Walter Savage Landor

143. “The highest price we can pay for anything; is to ask it.”

— Walter Savage Landor

144. “Despotism sits nowhere so secure as under the effigy and ensigns of freedom.”

— Walter Savage Landor

145. “The heart that once has been bathed in love’s pure fountain retains the pulse of youth forever.”

— Walter Savage Landor

146. “Great men too often have greater faults than little men can find room for.”

— Walter Savage Landor

147. “The very beautiful rarely love at all; those precious images are placed above the reach of the passions: Time alone is permitted to efface them.”

— Walter Savage Landor

148. “The eyes of critics, whether in commending or carping, are both on one side, like a turbot’s.”

— Walter Savage Landor

149. “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

150. “Children are what the mothers are.”

— Walter Savage Landor