Best 206 quotes of Walter Savage Landor on MyQuotes

Absurdities are great or small in proportion to custom or insuetude.

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.

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.

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

Ah what avails the sceptred race, Ah what the form divine! What every virtue, every grace! Rose Aylmer, all were thine. Rose Aylmer, whom these wakeful eyes May weep, but never see, A night of memories and of sighs I consecrate to thee.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

And Modesty, who, when she goes, Is gone for ever.

An ingenious mind feels in unmerited praise the bitterest reproof.

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

Around the child bend all the threeSweet Graces: Faith, Hope, Charity.Around the man bend other faces;Pride, Envy, Malice, are his Graces.

A smile is ever the most bright and beautiful with a tear upon it. What is the dawn without the dew? The tear is rendered by the smile precious above the smile itself.

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

As there are some flowers which you should smell but slightly to extract all that is pleasant in them ... so there are some men with whom a slight acquaintance is quite sufficient to draw out all that is agreeable; a more intimate one would be unsafe and unsatisfactory.

As we sometimes find one thing while we are looking for another, so, if truth escaped me, happiness and contentment fell in my way.

A true philosopher is beyond the reach of fortune.

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

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 wise man will always be a Christian, because the perfection of wisdom is to know where lies tranquillity of mind and how to attain it, which Christianity teaches.

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.

Belief in a future life is the appetite of reason.

But I have sinuous shells of pearly hue Within, and they that lustre have imbibed In the sun's palace-porch, where when unyoked chariot-wheel stands midway in the wave: Shake one, and it awakens; then apply Its polisht lips to your attentive ear, And it remembers its august abodes, And murmurs as the ocean murmurs there.

Children are what the mothers are.

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

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

Consult duty not events.

Contentment is better than divinations or visions.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Delay in justice is injustice.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

Everything that looks to the future elevates human nature.

Every witticism is an inexact thought; that which is perfectly true is imperfectly witty.

Experience is our only teacher both in war and peace.

Falsehood is for a season.

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.