Walter S Landor Quotes & Sayings

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. — Walter Savage Landor

O what a thing is age! Death without death's quiet. — Walter Savage Landor

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

We may receive so much light as not to see, and so much philosophy as to be worse than foolish. — 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. — Walter Savage Landor

No truer word, save God's, was ever spoken,
Than that the largest heart is soonest broken. — Walter Savage Landor

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. — Walter Savage Landor

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

A man's vanity tells him what is honor, a man's conscience what is justice. — Walter Savage Landor

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

No good writer was ever long neglected; no great man overlooked by men equally great. Impatience is a proof of inferior strength, and a destroyer of what little there may be. — Walter Savage Landor

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

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

Virtue is presupposed in friendship. — Walter Savage Landor

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

The eyes of critics, whether in commending or carping, are both on one side, like a turbot's. — Walter Savage Landor

The wise become as the unwise in the enchanted chambers of Power, whose lamps make every face the same colour. — Walter Savage Landor

The deafest man can hear praise, and is slow to think any an excess. — Walter Savage Landor

A mercantile democracy may govern long and widely; a mercantile aristocracy cannot stand. — Walter Savage Landor

God made the rose out of what was left of woman at the creation. The great difference is, we feel the rose's thorns when we gather it; and the other's when we have had it for some time. — Walter Savage Landor

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

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

Nothing is pleasanter to me than exploring in a library. — Walter Savage Landor

Goodness does not more certainly make men happy than happiness makes them good. — Walter Savage Landor

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

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. — Walter Savage Landor

There is a vast deal of vital air in loving words. — Walter Savage Landor

I warmed both hands before the fire of life; It sinks, and I am ready to depart. — 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. — Walter Savage Landor

Great men always pay deference to greater. — Walter Savage Landor

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

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

There is no eloquence which does not agitate the soul. — Walter Savage Landor

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. — Walter Savage Landor

Swinburne, by the way, when a very young man, had gone to Walter Savage Landor, then a very old man, and been given the poet's blessing he asked for; and Landor when a child had been patted on the head by Dr Samuel Johnson; and Johnson when a child had been taken to London to be touched by Queen Anne for scrofula, the King's evil; and Queen Anne when a child ... — Robert Graves

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

We talk on principal, but act on motivation. — Walter Savage Landor

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. — Walter Savage Landor

To my ninth decade I have totter'd on, And no soft arm bends now my steps to steady; She, who once led me where she would, is gone, So when he calls me, Death shall find me ready. — Walter Savage Landor

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

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

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. — Walter Savage Landor

The habit of pleasing by flattery makes a language soft; the fear of offending by truth makes it circuitous and conventional. — Walter Savage Landor

No thoroughly occupied person was ever found really miserable. — Walter Savage Landor

Nature I loved, and next to Nature, Art. — Walter Savage Landor

Let a gentleman be known to have been cheated of twenty pounds, and it costs him forty a-year for the remainder of his life. — Walter Savage Landor

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. — Walter Savage Landor

The happy never say, and never hear said, farewell. — Walter Savage Landor

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

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

Friendship may sometimes step a few paces in advance of truth. — Walter Savage Landor

Cats ask plainly for what they want. — Walter Savage Landor

The heart that once has been bathed in love's pure fountain retains the pulse of youth forever. — Walter Savage Landor

Fleas know not whether they are upon the body of a giant or upon one of ordinary size. — Walter Savage Landor