Quotes from Walter Savage Landor

Kings play at war unfairly with republics; they can only lose some earth, and some creatures they value as little, while republics lose in every soldier a part of themselves.

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

Politeness is not always a sign of wisdom; but the want of it always leaves room for a suspicion of folly, if folly and imprudence are the same.

A wise man will always be a Christian, because the perfection of wisdom is to know where lies tranquillity of mind and how to attain it, which Christianity teaches.

A man's vanity tells him what is honor, a man's conscience what is justice.

Goodness does not more certainly make men happy than happiness makes them good.

Men, like nails, lose their usefulness when they lose their direction and begin to bend.

Cruelty is the highest pleasure to the cruel man; it is his love.

Cats like men are flatterers.

Great men lose somewhat of their greatness by being near us; ordinary men gain much.

Political men, like goats, usually thrive best among inequalities.

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.

The foundation of domestic happiness is faith in the virtue of woman.

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.

Cruelty in all countries is the companion of anger; but there is only one, and never was another on the globe, where she coquets both with anger and mirth.

If in argument we can make a man angry with us, we have drawn him from his vantage ground and overcome him.

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

It is easy to look down on others; to look down on ourselves is the difficulty.

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.

Ambition is but avarice on stilts, and masked.

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

Those who in living fill the smallest space, In death have often left the greatest void.

Death stands above me, whispering low I know not what into my ear; Of his strange language all I know Is, there is not a word of fear.

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