Walter Savage Landor Men Quotations

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Be assured that, although men of eminent genius have been guilty of all other vices, none worthy of more than a secondary name has ever been a gamester. Either an excess of avarice or a deficiency of what, in physics, is called excitability, is the cause of it; neither of which can exist in the same bosom with genius, with patriotism, or with virtue.

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

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.

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.

Happiness, like air and water, the other two great requisites of life, is composite. One kind of it suits one man, another kind another. The elevated mind takes in and breathes out again that which would be uncongenial to the baser; and the baser draws life and enjoyment from that which would be putridity to the loftier.

States, like men, have their growth, their manhood, their decrepitude, their decay.

As there are some flowers which you should smell but slightly to extract all that is pleasant in them ... so there are some men with whom a slight acquaintance is quite sufficient to draw out all that is agreeable; a more intimate one would be unsafe and unsatisfactory.

Around the child bend all the threeSweet Graces: Faith, Hope, Charity.Around the man bend other faces;Pride, Envy, Malice, are his Graces.

Do not expect to be acknowledged for what you are, much less for what you would be; since no one can well measure a great man but upon the bier.

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

Great men too often have greater faults than little men can find room for.

It has been my fortune to love in general those men most who have thought most differently from me, on subjects wherein others pardon no discordance. I think I have no more right to be angry with a man, whose reason has followed up a process different from what mine has, and is satisfied with the result, than with one who has gone to Venice while I am at Siena, and who writes to me that he likes the place.

The deafest man can hear praise, and is slow to think any an excess.

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.

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

True wit, to every man, is that which falls on another.

Great men always pay deference to greater.

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

Two evils, of almost equal weight, may befall the man of erudition; never to be listened to, and to be listened to always.

Vast objects of remote altitude must be looked at a long while before they are ascertained. Ages are the telescope tubes that must be lengthened out for Shakespeare; and generations of men serve but a single witness to his claims.

I would recommend a free commerce both of matter and mind. I would let men enter their own churches with the same freedom as their own houses; and I would do it without a homily or graciousness or favor, for tyranny itself is to me a word less odious than toleration.

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

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

Whatever is worthy to be loved for anything is worthy of preservation. A wise and dispassionate legislator, if any such should ever arise among men, will not condemn to death him who has done or is likely to do more service than injury to society. Blocks and gibbets are the nearest objects with legislators, and their business is never with hopes or with virtues.

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.

I have since written what no tide Shall ever wash away, what men Unborn shall read o'er ocean wide And find Ianthe's name agen.

Avoid, which many grave men have not done, words taken from sacred subjects and from elevated poetry: these we have seen vilely prostituted. Avoid too the society of the barbarians who misemploy them.

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.

Cats like men are flatterers.