Walter savage landor quotes

Delay in justice is injustice.

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.

Everything that looks to the future elevates human nature.

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.

Solitude is the audience-chamber of God.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

When a cat flatters ... he is not insincere: you may safely take it for real kindness.

What is reading but silent conversation?

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.

A man's vanity tells him what is honor, a man's conscience what is justice.

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.

Cruelty is the highest pleasure to the cruel man; it is his love.

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

There is nothing on earth divine except humanity.

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

Study is the bane of childhood, the oil of youth, the indulgence of adulthood, and a restorative in old age.

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.

Cats like men are flatterers.

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.

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.

He who brings ridicule to bear against truth finds in his hand a blade without a hilt.

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

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

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

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?

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

The flame of anger, bright and brief, sharpens the barb of love.

If in argument we can make a man angry with us, we have drawn him from his vantage ground and overcome him.

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.

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

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

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

My thoughts are my company; I can bring them together, select them, detain them, dismiss them.

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.

Two evils, of almost equal weight, may befall the man of erudition; never to be listened to, and to be listened to always.

A good cook is the peculiar gift of the gods. He must be a perfect creature from the brain to the palate, from the palate to the finger's end.

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

Hope is the mother of faith.

An ingenious mind feels in unmerited praise the bitterest reproof.

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.

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

Greatness, as we daily see it, is unsociable.

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

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.

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.

Principles do not mainly influence even the principled; we talk on principle, but we act on interest.

Consult duty not events.

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.

Fancy is imagination in her youth and adolescence. Fancy is always excursive; imagination, not seldom, is sedate.

Many love music but for music's sake, Many because her touches can awake Thoughts that repose within the breast half-dead, And rise to follow where she loves to lead. What various feelings come from days gone by! What tears from far-off sources dim the eye! Few, when light fingers with sweet voices play, And melodies swell, pause, and melt away, Mind how at every touch, at every tone, A spark of life hath glistened and hath gone.

Those who are quite satisfied sit still and do nothing; those who are not quite satisfied are the sole benefactors of the world.

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

An ingenuous mind feels in unmerited praise the bitterest reproof. If you reject it you are unhappy, if you accept it you are undone.

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

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.

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

We cannot be contented because we are happy, and we cannot be happy because we are contented.

No ashes are lighter than those of incense, and few things burn out sooner.

Be assured that, although men of eminent genius have been guilty of all other vices, none worthy of more than a secondary name has ever been a gamester. Either an excess of avarice or a deficiency of what, in physics, is called excitability, is the cause of it; neither of which can exist in the same bosom with genius, with patriotism, or with virtue.

The Siren waits thee, singing song for song.

We fancy we suffer from ingratitude, while in reality we suffer from self-love.

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.

Nothing is pleasanter to me than exploring in a library.

Children are what the mothers are.

I have since written what no tide Shall ever wash away, what men Unborn shall read o'er ocean wide And find Ianthe's name agen.

Next in criminality to him who violates the laws of his country, is he who violates the language.

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

Let me take up your metaphor. Friendship is a vase, which, when it is flawed by heat or violence or accident, may as well be broken at once; it can never be trusted after. The more graceful and ornamental it was, the more clearly do we discern the hopelessness of restoring it to its former state. Coarse stones, if they are fractured, may be cemented again; precious stones, never.

I strove with none, for none was worth my strife. Nature I loved and, next to Nature, Art: I warm'd both hands before the fire of life; It sinks, and I am ready to depart.

Experience is our only teacher both in war and peace.

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

Little men build up great ones, but the snow colossus soon melts; the good stand under the eye of God, and therefore stand.

How sweet and sacred idleness is!

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.

Goodness does not more certainly make men happy than happiness makes them good.

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

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.

We talk on principal, but act on motivation.

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.

Wise or unwise, who doubts for a moment that contentment is the cause of happiness? Yet the inverse is true: we are contented because we are happy, and not happy because we are contented. Well-regulated minds may be satisfied with a small portion of happiness; none can be happy with a small portion of content.

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

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.

Contentment is better than divinations or visions.

Life is but sighs; and, when they cease, 'tis over.

Wrong is but falsehood put in practice.

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

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.

No thoroughly occupied person was ever found really miserable.

Shakespeare is not our poet, but the world's.

Great men always pay deference to greater.

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

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

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

Happiness, like air and water, the other two great requisites of life, is composite. One kind of it suits one man, another kind another. The elevated mind takes in and breathes out again that which would be uncongenial to the baser; and the baser draws life and enjoyment from that which would be putridity to the loftier.

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

A mercantile democracy may govern long and widely; a mercantile aristocracy cannot stand.

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.

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.

Music is God's gift to man, the only art of Heaven given to earth, the only art of earth we take to Heaven.

The happy never say, and never hear said, farewell.

No friendship is so cordial or so delicious as that of girl for girl; no hatred so intense and immovable as that of woman for woman.

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

We are no longer happy so soon as we wish to be happier.

There is no eloquence which does not agitate the soul.

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.

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

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

Everything that looks to the future elevates human nature; for never is life so low or so little as when occupied with the present.

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

The tomb is the pedestal of greatness. I make a distinction between God's great and the king's great.

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

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

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.

The spirit of Greece, passing through and ascending above the world, hath so animated universal nature, that the very rocks and woods, the very torrents and wilds burst forth with it.

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.

Death stands above me, whispering low I know not what into my ear; Of his strange language all I know Is, there is not a word of fear.

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

A true philosopher is beyond the reach of fortune.

It is as wise to moderate our belief as our desires.

There is no more certain sign of a narrow mind, of stupidity, and of arrogance, than to stand aloof from those who think differently from us.