Quotes from Walter Savage Landor

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.

Absence and death are the same -- only that in death there is no suffering.

Consult duty not events.

Great men always pay deference to greater.

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.

No thoroughly occupied person was ever found really miserable.

O what a thing is age! Death without death's quiet.

People, like nails, lose their effectiveness when they lose direction and begin to bend.

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.

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

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

Nothing is pleasanter to me than exploring in a library.

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

Dying Speech of an Old Philosopher 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.

Cats ask plainly for what they want.

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

We must not indulge in unfavorable views of mankind, since by doing it we make bad men believe they are no worse than others, and we teach the good that they are good in vain.

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

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

Cats, like men, are flatterers.

The damps of autumn sink into the leaves and prepare them for the necessity of their fall; and thus insensibly are we, as years close around us, detached from our tenacity of life by the gentle pressure of recorded sorrow.

Death stands above me, Whispering low I know not what into my ear.

Petulance is not wit, although a few grains of wit may be found in petulance; quartz is not gold, although a few grains of gold may be found in quartz.

On love, on grief, on every human thing, Time sprinkles Lethe's water with his wing.