Walter Savage Landor Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “Greatness, as we daily see it, is unsociable.”

— Walter Savage Landor

102. “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

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

— Walter Savage Landor

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

— Walter Savage Landor

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

— Walter Savage Landor

106. “Experience is our only teacher both in war and peace.”

— Walter Savage Landor

107. “Cats ask plainly for what they want.”

— Walter Savage Landor

108. “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

109. “Cats like men are flatterers.”

— Walter Savage Landor

110. “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

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

— Walter Savage Landor

112. “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

113. “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

114. “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

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

— Walter Savage Landor

116. “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

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

— Walter Savage Landor

118. “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

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

— Walter Savage Landor

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

— Walter Savage Landor

121. “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

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

— Walter Savage Landor

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

— Walter Savage Landor

124. “Virtue is presupposed in friendship.”

— Walter Savage Landor

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

— Walter Savage Landor

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

— Walter Savage Landor

127. “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

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

— Walter Savage Landor

129. “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

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

— Walter Savage Landor

131. “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

132. “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

133. “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

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

— Walter Savage Landor

135. “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

136. “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

137. “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

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

— Walter Savage Landor

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

— Walter Savage Landor

140. “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

141. “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

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

— Walter Savage Landor

143. “Children are what the mothers are.”

— Walter Savage Landor

144. “O what a thing is age! Death without death’s quiet.”

— Walter Savage Landor

145. “In honest truth, a name given to a man is no better than a skin given to him; what is not natively his own falls off and comes to nothing.”

— Walter Savage Landor

146. “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

147. “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

148. “The vain poet is of the opinion that nothing of his can be too much: he sends to you basketful after basketful of juiceless fruit, covered with scentless flowers.”

— Walter Savage Landor

149. “The tomb is the pedestal of greatness. I make a distinction between God’s great and the king’s great.”

— Walter Savage Landor

150. “I have suffered more from my bad dancing than from all the misfortunes and miseries of my life put together.”

— Walter Savage Landor