Letitia Elizabeth Landon
474 quotes
Biography
"How disappointment tracks the steps of hope."
"Society is like a large piece of frozen water; and skating well is the great art of social life."
"Delicious tears! the heart's own dew."
"Death's a fearful thing when we must count its steps!"
"How I pity those whose childhood has been unhappy! to them one of the sweetest springs of feeling has been utterly denied, the most green and beautiful part of life laid waste."
"Alas, tears are the poet's heritage!"
"Childhood whose very happiness is love."
"I am a woman:—tell me not of fame."
"For a discussion of some of the contents of this significant cultural volume, see Adriana Craciun, ‘Fatal Women of Romanticism’, Cambridge University Press, 2004, page 204. The section ‘The Enchantress’ here begins by describing that first story as a ‘self-consciously Byronic text’ that ‘develops a Promethean, distinctly Luciferian model of poetic identity and self-creation’."
"Water—the mighty, the pure, the beautiful, the unfathomable—where is thy element so glorious as it is in thine own domain, the deep seas ? What an infinity of power is in the far Atlantic, the boundary of two separate worlds, apart like those of memory and of hope ! or in the bright Pacific, whose tides are turned to gold by a southern sun, and in whose bosom sleep a thousand isles, each covered with the verdure, the flowers, and the fruit of Eden ! But, amid all thy hereditary kingdoms, to which hast thou given beauty, as a birthright, lavishly as thou hast to thy favourite Mediterranean ? The silence of a summer night is now sleeping on its bosom, where the bright stars are mirrored, as if in its depths they had another home and another heaven. A spirit, cleaving air midway between the two, might have paused to ask which was sea, and which was sky. The shadows of earth and earthly things, resting omen-like upon the waters, alone shewed which was the home and which the mirror of the celestial host."
"We step not over the threshold of childhood till led by Love"
"Strange, that ignorance should be our best happiness in this life, and yet be the one we are ever striving to destroy !"
"The weakness of our nature—how soon any strong emotion masters it !"
"I had lost of humanity but its illusions, and they alone are what render it supportable."
"Truly, night was made for sleep; since to its wakeful hours belongs an oppression unknown to the very dreariest hours of day. The stillness is so deep, the solitude so unbroken, the fever brought on by want of rest so weakens the nerves, that the imagination exercises despotic and unwholesome power, till, if the heart have a fear or a sorrow, up it arises in all the force and terror of gigantic exaggeration."
"For when do friends not delight in the sorrow of the prosperous?"
"He who seeks pleasure with reference to himself, not others, will ever find that pleasure is only another name for discontent."
"In sad truth, half our forebodings of our neighbours are but our own wishes, which we are ashamed to utter in any other form."
"How often will the lip frame some indifferent question, when the heart is full of the most important!"
"How strong is the love of the country in all indwellers of towns !"
"Curious it is that every hour of our day is repeated from myriad chimes; and yet how rarely do we attend to the clock striking! Alas! how emblematic is this of the way in which we neglect the many signs of time! How terrible, when we think of what time may achieve, is the manner in which we waste it! At the end of every man's life, at least three-quarters of the mighty element of which that life was composed will be found void—lost—nay, utterly forgotten! And yet that time, laboured and husbanded, might have built palaces, gathered wealth, and, still greater, made an imperishable name."
"Poverty is a terrible thing when it bows to the very ground the pride of the strong man—a terrible thing when it leaves old age destitute: till, the strong man may yet redeem his fortunes, and that old age may have had enjoyment while it was capable of enjoying. But a child, with the step slow from weakness, which from its age should be so buoyant; a cheek thin and white from hunger, at a period which especially cares for food (for all children are greedy); a form shrivelled with cold; a growth stopped by work too laborious for such tender years; a spirit broken by toil, want, and harshness; —is not such a child poverty's most miserable spectacle? It is, however, a common one."
"{of Theatres} There, while weeping for sorrows which are not, laughing at the light jest or the ludicrous misadventure, how little is remembered of the want which makes fear the only bond that binds the living to life !"
"Good and evil ! good and evil ! ye are mingled inextricably in the web of our being ; and who may unthread the darker yarn ?"
"There must be some deep-rooted anti-social principle in every man's nature, so dearly does he love aught that separates him from his kind ; or is it but one of the many shapes taken by that mental kaleidoscope, vanity, the varying and the glittering, the desire of distinction, sinking into that of notice?"