Top 200 Walter Savage Landor Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “O what a thing is age! Death without death’s quiet.”

— Walter Savage Landor

152. “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

153. “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

154. “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

155. “Great men always pay deference to greater.”

— Walter Savage Landor

156. “I hate false words, and seek with care, difficulty, and moroseness, those that fit the thing.”

— Walter Savage Landor

157. “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

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

— Walter Savage Landor

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

— Walter Savage Landor

160. “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.”

— Walter Savage Landor

161. “There are proud men of so much delicacy that it almost conceals their pride, and perfectly excuses it.”

— Walter Savage Landor

162. “Everything that looks to the future elevates human nature.”

— Walter Savage Landor

163. “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

164. “It is delightful to kiss the eyelashes of the beloved – is it not? But never so delightful as when fresh tears are on them.”

— Walter Savage Landor

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

— Walter Savage Landor

166. “I would recommend a free commerce both of matter and mind. I would let men enter their own churches with the same freedom as their own houses; and I would do it without a homily or graciousness or favor, for tyranny itself is to me a word less odious than toleration.”

— Walter Savage Landor

167. “Piety – warm, soft, and passive as the ether round the throne of Grace – is made callous and inactive by kneeling too much.”

— Walter Savage Landor

168. “The happiest of pillows is not that which love first presses! it is that which death has frowned on and passed over.”

— Walter Savage Landor

169. “Other offences, even the greatest, are the violation of one law: despotism is the violation of all.”

— Walter Savage Landor

170. “We care not how many see us in choler, when we rave and bluster, and make as much noise and bustle as we can; but if the kindest and most generous affection comes across us, we suppress every sign of it, and hide ourselves in nooks and covert.”

— Walter Savage Landor

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

— Walter Savage Landor

172. “We cannot at once catch the applauses of the vulgar and expect the approbation of the wise.”

— Walter Savage Landor

173. “Modesty and diffidence make a man unfit for public affairs; they also make him unfit for brothels.”

— Walter Savage Landor

174. “Sculpture and painting are moments of life; poetry is life itself.”

— Walter Savage Landor

175. “Vast objects of remote altitude must be looked at a long while before they are ascertained. Ages are the telescope tubes that must be lengthened out for Shakespeare; and generations of men serve but a single witness to his claims.”

— Walter Savage Landor

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

— Walter Savage Landor

177. “Such is our impatience, such our hatred of procrastination, to everything but the amendment of our practices and the adornment of our nature, one would imagine we were dragging Time along by force, and not he us.”

— Walter Savage Landor

178. “Avoid, which many grave men have not done, words taken from sacred subjects and from elevated poetry: these we have seen vilely prostituted. Avoid too the society of the barbarians who misemploy them.”

— Walter Savage Landor

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

— Walter Savage Landor

180. “Even the weakest disputant is made so conceited by what he calls religion, as to think himself wiser than the wisest who thinks differently from him.”

— Walter Savage Landor

181. “Consult duty not events.”

— Walter Savage Landor

182. “As the pearl ripens in the obscurity of its shell, so ripens in the tomb all the fame that is truly precious.”

— Walter Savage Landor

183. “He who first praises a book becomingly is next in merit to the author.”

— Walter Savage Landor

184. “Fame often rests at first upon something accidental, and often, too, is swept away, or for a time removed; but neither genius nor glory, is conferred at once, nor do they glimmer and fall, like drops in a grotto, at a shout.”

— Walter Savage Landor

185. “Merit has rarely risen of itself, but a pebble or a twig is often quite sufficient for it to spring from to the highest ascent. There is usually some baseness before there is any elevation.”

— Walter Savage Landor

186. “When the mind loses its feeling for elegance, it grows corrupt and groveling, and seeks in the crowd what ought to be found at home.”

— Walter Savage Landor

187. “Great men lose somewhat of their greatness by being near us; ordinary men gain much.”

— Walter Savage Landor

188. “Nations, like individuals, interest us in their growth.”

— Walter Savage Landor

189. “Teach him to live unto God and unto thee; and he will discover that women, like the plants in woods, derive their softness and tenderness from the shade.”

— Walter Savage Landor

190. “The worse of ingratitude lies not in the ossified heart of him who commits it, but we find it in the effect it produces on him against whom it was committed.”

— Walter Savage Landor

191. “The habit of pleasing by flattery makes a language soft; the fear of offending by truth makes it circuitous and conventional.”

— Walter Savage Landor

192. “Contentment is better than divinations or visions.”

— Walter Savage Landor

193. “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.”

— Walter Savage Landor

194. “True wit, to every man, is that which falls on another.”

— Walter Savage Landor

195. “He who brings ridicule to bear against truth finds in his hand a blade without a hilt. The most sparkling and pointed flame of wit flickers and expires against the incombustible walls of her sanctuary.”

— Walter Savage Landor

196. “Cruelty, if we consider it as a crime, is the greatest of all; if we consider it as a madness, we are equally justifiable in applying to it the readiest and the surest means of oppression.”

— Walter Savage Landor

197. “Why cannot we be delighted with an author, and even feel a predilection for him, without a dislike of others? An admiration of Catullus or Virgil, of Tibullus or Ovid, is never to be heightened by a discharge of bile on Horace.”

— Walter Savage Landor

198. “I delight in the diffusion of learning; yet, I must confess it, I am most gratified and transported at finding a large quantity of it in one place; just as I would rather have a solid pat of butter at breakfast, than a splash of grease upon the table-cloth that covers half of it.”

— Walter Savage Landor

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

— Walter Savage Landor

200. “Falsehood is for a season.”

— Walter Savage Landor