WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR QUOTES
English writer and poet (1775-1864)
The royal lottery-keeper is both a gambler and a swindler; for in his playing he knows that the stake he lays down is unequal to his opponent's.
WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR
Imaginary Conversations
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
"Barrow and Newton", Dialogues of Literary Men
Every sect is a moral check on its neighbor. Competition is as wholesome in religion as in commerce.
WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR
Imaginary Conversations
The worst 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. As water containing stony particles encrusts with them the ferns and mosses it drops on, so the human breast hardens under ingratitude, in proportion to its openness, and aptitude to receive impressions.
WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR
Imaginary Conversations
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.
WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR
Imaginary Conversations
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.
WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR
Second Series of Imaginary Conversations
Life is but sighs; and, when they cease, 'tis over.
WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR
Imaginary Conversations
Shakespeare is not our poet, but the world's.
WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR
"To Robert Browning"
Before there is wine or there is oil, the grape must be trodden and the olive must be pressed.
WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR
Imaginary Conversations
Delay of justice is injustice.
WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR
Imaginary Conversations
An ingenuous mind feels in unmerited praise the bitterest reproof. If you reject it you are unhappy, if you accept it you are undone.
WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR
Imaginary Conversations
A solitude is the audience-chamber of God.
WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR
Imaginary Conversations
We cannot conquer fate and necessity, yet we can yield to them in such a manner as to be greater than if we could.
WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR
Imaginary Conversations
A smile is ever the most bright and beautiful with a tear upon it. What is the dawn without its dew?
WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR
Imaginary Conversations
Ambition is but Avarice on stilts and masked.
WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR
Imaginary Conversations
Glory can be safely despised by those only who have fairly won it.
WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR
Imaginary Conversations
Merit has rarely risen of itself, but a pebble or a twig is often quite sufficient for it to spring to the highest ascent.
WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR
Aphorisms
I have suffered more from my bad dancing than from all the misfortunes and miseries of my life put together.
WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR
The Letters of Walter Savage Landor to Marguerite, Countess of Blessington
What is reading but silent conversation.
WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR
Imaginary Conversations
Even the wise become as the unwise in the enchanted chambers of Power, whose lamps make every face of the same colour.
WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR
Imaginary Conversations