Best 206 quotes of Walter Savage Landor on MyQuotes

Walter Savage Landor

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    Walter Savage Landor

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

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    Walter Savage Landor

    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.

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    Walter Savage Landor

    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.

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    Walter Savage Landor

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

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    Walter Savage Landor

    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.

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    Walter Savage Landor

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

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    Walter Savage Landor

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

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    Walter Savage Landor

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

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    Walter Savage Landor

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

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    Walter Savage Landor

    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.

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    Walter Savage Landor

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

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    Walter Savage Landor

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

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    Walter Savage Landor

    An ingenious mind feels in unmerited praise the bitterest reproof.

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    Walter Savage Landor

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

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    Walter Savage Landor

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

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    Walter Savage Landor

    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.

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    Walter Savage Landor

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

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    Walter Savage Landor

    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.

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    Walter Savage Landor

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

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    Walter Savage Landor

    A true philosopher is beyond the reach of fortune.

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    Walter Savage Landor

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

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    Walter Savage Landor

    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.

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    Walter Savage Landor

    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.

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    Walter Savage Landor

    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.

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    Walter Savage Landor

    Belief in a future life is the appetite of reason.

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    Walter Savage Landor

    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.

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    Walter Savage Landor

    Children are what the mothers are.

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    Walter Savage Landor

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

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    Walter Savage Landor

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

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    Walter Savage Landor

    Consult duty not events.

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    Walter Savage Landor

    Contentment is better than divinations or visions.

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    Walter Savage Landor

    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.

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    Walter Savage Landor

    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.

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    Walter Savage Landor

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

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    Walter Savage Landor

    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.

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    Walter Savage Landor

    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.

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    Walter Savage Landor

    Delay in justice is injustice.

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    Walter Savage Landor

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

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    Walter Savage Landor

    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.

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    Walter Savage Landor

    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.

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    Walter Savage Landor

    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.

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    Walter Savage Landor

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

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    Walter Savage Landor

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

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    Walter Savage Landor

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

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    Walter Savage Landor

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

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    Walter Savage Landor

    Everything that looks to the future elevates human nature.

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    Walter Savage Landor

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

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    Walter Savage Landor

    Experience is our only teacher both in war and peace.

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    Walter Savage Landor

    Falsehood is for a season.

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    Walter Savage Landor

    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.