Quotes from Walter Savage Landor

I strove with none for none were worth my strife. Nature I loved and next to nature, Art. I warmed both hands before the fire of life; it sinks, and I am ready to depart. - Walter Savage Landor 1776-1864

Gather those broad leaves, and all the rest, growing under the brushwood; unbrace his armour. Loose the helmet first

There is delight in singing, though none hear beside the singer.

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

Little men build up great ones, but the snow colossus soon melts; the good stand under the eye of God, and therefore stand.

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

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

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.

Men universally are ungrateful towards him who instructs them, unless, in the hours or in the intervals of instruction, he presents a sweet-cake to their self-love.

In honest truth, a name given to a man is no better than a skin given to him; what is not natively his own falls off and comes to nothing.

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

Modesty and diffidence make a man unfit for public affairs; they also make him unfit for brothels.

Old trees in their living state are the only things that money cannot command.

The highest price we can pay for anything; is to ask it.

Those who are quite satisfied sit still and do nothing; those who are not quite satisfied are the sole benefactors of the world.

O Music! how it grieves me that imprudence, intemperance, gluttony, should open their channels into thy sacred stream.

The present, like a note in music, is nothing but as it appertains to what is past and what is to come.

The spirit of Greece, passing through and ascending above the world, hath so animated universal nature, that the very rocks and woods, the very torrents and wilds burst forth with it.

Nature I loved, and next to Nature, Art.

There is a desire of property in the sanest and best men, which Nature seems to have implanted as conservative of her works, and which is necessary to encourage and keep alive the arts.

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

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.

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

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