Quotes from Walter Savage Landor

Solitude is the audience-chamber of God.

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.

Teach him to live unto God and unto thee; and he will discover that women, like the plants in woods, derive their softness and tenderness from the shade.

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

God scatters beauty as he scatters flowers O'er the wide earth, and tells us all are ours. A hundred lights in every temple burn, And at each shrine I bend my knee in turn.

We cannot be contented because we are happy, and we cannot be happy because we are contented.

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

When the mind loses its feeling for elegance, it grows corrupt and groveling, and seeks in the crowd what ought to be found at home.

There is nothing on earth divine except humanity.

We are poor, indeed, when we have no half-wishes left us. The heart and the imagination close the shutters the instant they are gone.

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

Where power is absent we may find the robe of genius, but we miss the throne.

That which moveth the heart most is the best poetry; it comes nearest unto God, the source of all power.

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

Consult duty not events.

We talk on principal, but act on motivation.

Religion is the eldest sister of philosophy: on whatever subjects they may differ, it is unbecoming in either to quarrel, and most so about their inheritance.

The religion of Christ is peace and good-will,--the religion of Christendom is war and ill-will.

The most pernicious of absurdities is that weak, blind, stupid faith is better than the constant practice of every human virtue.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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