Quotes by Walter Landor

• We cannot be contented because we are happy, and we cannot be happy because we are contented.
• There is nothing on earth divine except humanity.
• Truth, like the juice of the poppy, in small quantities, calms men; in larger, heats and irritates them, and is attended by fatal consequences in excess.
• We are no longer happy so soon as we wish to be happier.
• There is no easy path leading out of life, and few easy ones that lie within it.
• We often fancy that we suffer from ingratitude, while in reality we suffer from self-love.
• We talk on principal, but act on motivation.
• We think that we suffer from ingratitude, while in reality we suffer from self-love.
• No thoroughly occupied person was ever found really miserable.
• In argument, truth always prevails finally; in politics, falsehood always.
• There is delight in singing, though none hear beside the singer.
• No ashes are lighter than those of incense, and few things burn out sooner.
• Goodness does not more certainly make men happy than happiness makes them good.
• A man's vanity tells him what is honor, a man's conscience what is justice.
• A solitude is the audience-chamber of God.
• Ambition has but one reward for all: A little power, a little transient fame; A grave to rest in, and a fading name!
• Many laws as certainly make bad men, as bad men make many laws.
• Ambition is but avarice on stilts, and masked.
• An ingenuous mind feels in unmerited praise the bitterest reproof.
• Great men always pay deference to greater.
• Consult duty not events.
• Delay in justice is injustice.
• Even the weakest disputant is made so conceited by what he calls religion, as to think himself wiser than the wisest who think differently from him.
• The writing of the wise are the only riches our posterity cannot squander.
• Men, like nails, lose their usefulness when they lose their direction and begin to bend.
• Everything that looks to the future elevates human nature.
• I strove with none; for none was worth my strife.
• Music is God's gift to man, the only art of Heaven given to earth, the only art of earth we take to Heaven.
• My thoughts are my company; I can bring them together, select them, detain them, dismiss them.
• 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.
• Great men lose somewhat of their greatness by being near us; ordinary men gain much.
• Study is the bane of childhood, the oil of youth, the indulgence of adulthood, and a restorative in old age.
• The flame of anger, bright and brief, sharpens the barb of love.
• The Siren waits thee, singing song for song.
• The wise become as the unwise in the enchanted chambers of Power, whose lamps make every face the same colour.
• Every sect is a moral check on its neighbour. Competition is as wholesome in religion as in commerce.