Contents -BIBLIOGRAPHIC RECORD

S. Austin Allibone, comp. Prose Quotations from Socrates to Macaulay. 1880.

Walter Savage Landor

Absurdities are great or small in proportion to custom or insuetude.

We must distinguish between felicity and prosperity; for prosperity leads often to ambition, and ambition to disappointment: the course is then over, the wheel turns round but once, while the reaction of goodness and happiness is perpetual.

The happy man is he who distinguishes the boundary between desire and delight, and stands firmly on the higher ground,—he who knows that pleasure is not only not possession, but is often to be lost, and always to be endangered by it.

The verdict of the judges was biassed by nothing else than their habitudes of feeling.

Kingship is a profession which has produced both the most illustrious and the most contemptible of the human race.

The laws are at present, both in form and essence, the greatest curse that society labours under.

There is a greater difference both in the stages of life and in the seasons of the year than in the conditions of men: yet the healthy pass through the seasons, from the clement to the unclement, not only unreluctant but rejoicingly, knowing that the worst will soon finish, and the best begin anew; and we are desirous of pushing forward into every stage of life, excepting that only which ought reasonably to allure us most, as opening to us the Via sacra, along which we move in triumph to our eternal country. We labour to get through a crowd. Such is our impatience, such our hatred of procrastination, in everything but the amendment of our practices and the adornment of our nature, one would imagine we were dragging Time along by force, and not he us.

The Frenchmen are the most delicate people in the world on points of honour, and the least delicate on points of justice.

In the very best [poetry] there is often an under-song of sense which none but the poetic mind … can comprehend.

We must distinguish between felicity and prosperity; for prosperity leads often to ambition, and ambition to disappointment.

Ridicule has followed the vestiges of Truth, but never usurped her place.

The hypallage, of which Virgil is fonder than any other writer, is much the gravest fault in language.

The virtuous man meets with more opposites and opponents than any other.

I am heartily glad to witness your veneration for a Book which, to say nothing of its holiness or authority, contains more specimens of genius and taste than any other volume in existence.

Study is the bane of boyhood, the aliment of youth, the indulgence of manhood, and the restorative of old age.