Quotes from Letitia Elizabeth Landon

The attention of a superior is too flattering to our vanity not to call it forth.

The first love-letter is an epoch in love's happy season — it makes assurance doubly sure — that which has hitherto, perhaps, only found utterance in sweet and hurried words, now seems to take a more tangible existence. A love-letter is a proof of how dearly, even in absence, you are remembered.

The free pen, prone to pour out the suggestions of artless affection, vivid imagination, or domestic anecdote, is as much woman's especial instrument as the needle.

The good and the generous action of which we feel incapable is a reproach when done by another.

The history of most fictions would be far stranger than the fictions themselves ; but it would be a dark and sad chronicle.

The past was once the future, and it wrought In the high presence of on-looking thought ; All that we have, was by its efforts brought.

The power of young Joy, like that of young Love, does not travel far on the dusty road of life in general.

THE present! it is but a drop from the sea In the mighty depths of eternity. I love it not—it taketh its birth Too near to the dull and the common earth.

The same, yet not the same

There are in existence two periods when we shrink from any great vicissitude—early youth and old age. In the middle of life, we are indifferent to change ; for we have discovered that nothing is, in the end, so good or so bad as it at first appeared.

There are no weaknesses which we so thoroughly despise as those to which ourselves have yielded.

There is a steep and lofty wall, Where my warders trembling stand, He who at speed shall ride round its height, For him shall be my hand.

Truth is like the philosopher's stone, a thing not to be discovered.

Vanity is the real lever with which Archimedes said he could move the earth;

I never cast a flower away, A gift of one who car'd for me; A flower--a faded flower, But it was done reluctantly.

Confidence is its own security.

I will look on the stars and look on thee, and read the page of thy destiny.

though fortune's wheel is generally on the turn, sometimes when it gets into the mud, it sticks there.

it is a curious fact, but one which all experience owns, that people do not desire so much to appear better, as to appear different from what they really are.