Letitia Elizabeth Landon Quotes

The fearless make their own way.

Suicide and antipathy to fires in a bedroom seem to be among the national characteristics. Perhaps the same moral cause may originate both.

sight-seeing gratifies us in different ways. First, there is the pleasure of novelty; secondly, either that of admiration or fault-finding - the latter a very animated enjoyment.

The very effort to forget teaches us to remember.

We are ourselves our happiness.

When does the mind put forth its powers? when are the stores of memory unlocked? when does wit 'flash from fluent lips?' -- when but after a good dinner? Who will deny its influence on the affections? Half our friends are born of turbots and truffles.

The old proverb, applied to fire and water, may with equal truth be applied to the imagination - it is a good servant, but a bad master.

Nothing is so fortunate for mankind as its diversity of opinion.

Hope is love's happiness, but not its life.

Few save the poor feel for the poor.

Jealousy ought to be tragic, to save it from being ridiculous.

Good taste is his religion, his morality, his standard, and his test.

I have a respect for family pride. If it be a prejudice, it is a prejudice in its most picturesque shape. But I hold it is connected with some of the noblest feelings in our nature.

A woman only can understand a woman.

Affection exaggerates its own offenses.

We might have been - these are but common words, and yet they make the sum of life's bewailing.

I cannot love evergreens - they are the misanthropes of nature. To them the spring brings no promise, the autumn no decline; they are cut off from the sweetest of all ties with their kind - sympathy. ... I will have no evergreens in my garden; when the inevitable winter comes, every beloved plant and favorite tree shall drop together - no solitary fir left to triumph over the companionship of decay.

youth, balancing itself upon hope, is forever in extremes: its expectations are continually aroused only to be baffled, and disappointment, like a summer shower, is violent in proportion to its brevity.

The truth is, we never make for others the allowance we make for ourselves; and we should deny even our own words, could we hear them spoken by another.

Shopping, true feminine felicity!

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

Farewell's a bitter word to say.

What is life? A gulf of troubled waters, where the soul, like a vexed bark, is tossed upon the waves of pain and pleasure by the wavering breath of passions.

Imagination is to love what gas is to the balloon-that which raises it from earth.

It merely shews, after all, that affection is a habit.

It is a curious fact, but a fact it is, that your witty people are the most hard-hearted in the world. The truth is, fancy destroys feeling. The quick eye to the ridiculous turns every thing to the absurd side; and the neat sentence, the lively allusion, and the odd simile, invest what they touch with something of their own buoyant nature. Humor is of the heart, and has its tears; but wit is of the head, and has only smiles - and the majority of those are bitter.

Do anything but love; or if thou lovest and art a woman, hide thy love from him whom thou dost worship; never let him know how dear he is; flit like a bird before him; lead him from tree to tree, from flower to flower; but be not won, or thou wilt, like that bird, when caught and caged, be left to pine neglected and perish in forgetfulness.

It is curious how inseparable eating and kindness are with some people.

If there be any one habit which more than another is the dry rot of all that is high and generous in youth, it is the habit of ridicule.

Enthusiasm is the divine particle in our composition: with it we are great, generous, and true; without it, we are little, false, and mean.

Business before pleasure.

All sweeping assertions are erroneous.

There is no denying that there are 'royal roads' through existence for the upper classes; for them, at least, the highways are macadamized, swept, and watered.

habit is our idea of eternity.

I think hearts are very much like glasses. If they do not break with the first ring, they usually last a considerable time.

The past is perpetual youth to the heart.

An apt quotation is like a lamp which flings its light over the whole sentence.

ingratitude is the necessary consequence of receiving favors of which we are ashamed.

The rich know not how hard it is to be of needful rest and needful food debarred.

In our road through life we may happen to meet with a man casting a stone reverentially to enlarge the cairn of another which stone he has carried in his bosom to sling against that very other's head.

I hate the word 'ought' - it always implies something dull, cold, and commonplace. The 'ought nots' of life are its pleasantest things.

Youth is a season that has no repose.

We would liken music to Aladdin's lamp — worthless in itself, not so for the spirits which obey its call. We love it for the buried hopes, the garnered memories, the tender feelings, it can summon with a touch.

Oh, only those whose souls have felt this one idolatry can tell how precious is the slightest thing affection gives and hallows.

A sealed book, at whose contents we tremble.

Sneering springs out of the wish to deny; and wretched must that state of mind be that wishes to take refuge in doubt.

Curiosity is its own suicide.

Are we not like the actor of old times, who wore his mask so long his face took its likeness?