We love music for the buried hopes, the garnered memories, the tender feelings it can summon at a touch.
—Letitia Elizabeth Landon
Topics: Music
It is the inevitable end of guilt that it places its own punishment on a chance which is sure to occur.
—Letitia Elizabeth Landon
Topics: Guilt
Half our forebodings of our neighbors, are but our wishes, which we are ashamed to utter in any other form.
—Letitia Elizabeth Landon
What mockeries are our most firm resolves.—To will is ours, but not to execute. We map our future like some unknown coast, and say here is a harbor, there a rock; the one we will attain, the other shun, and we do neither; some chance gale springs up, and bears us far o’er some unfathomed sea.
—Letitia Elizabeth Landon
Hard are life’s early steps; and but that youth is buoyant, confident, and strong in hope, men would behold its threshold and despair.
—Letitia Elizabeth Landon
Topics: Youth
The retrospect of youth is often like visiting the grave of a friend whom we have injured, and are prevented by his death from the possibility of making reparation.
—Letitia Elizabeth Landon
Topics: Youth
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.
—Letitia Elizabeth Landon
Happiness is like the statue of Isis, whose veil no mortal ever raised.
—Letitia Elizabeth Landon
Topics: Happiness
Habits are the petrefaction of feelings.
—Letitia Elizabeth Landon
Topics: Habit
An apt quotation is like a lamp which flings its light over the whole sentence.
—Letitia Elizabeth Landon
Topics: Quotations, Light
One of the greatest of all mental pleasures is to have our thoughts often divined; ever entered into with sympathy.
—Letitia Elizabeth Landon
Topics: Sympathy
Who can confess his poverty and look it in the face, destroys its sting: but a proud poor man, he is poor, indeed.
—Letitia Elizabeth Landon
Topics: Poverty
Charity is a calm, severe duty; it must be intellectual, to be advantageous. It is a strange mistake that it should ever be considered a merit; its fulfilment is only what we owe to each other, and is a debt never paid to its full extent.
—Letitia Elizabeth Landon
Topics: Charity
The pride of blood has a most important and beneficial influence.—It is much to feel that the high and honorable belong to a name that is pledged to the present by the recollections of the past.
—Letitia Elizabeth Landon
Topics: Ancestry
Our own faults are those we are the first to detect, and the last to forgive, in others.
—Letitia Elizabeth Landon
Topics: Faults
Occupation is one great source of enjoyment. No man, properly occupied, was ever miserable.
—Letitia Elizabeth Landon
Topics: Employment
Our sympathy is never very deep unless founded on our own feelings. We pity, but do not enter into the grief which we have never felt.
—Letitia Elizabeth Landon
Topics: Sympathy
Time is the great comforter of grief, but the agency by which it works is exhaustion.
—Letitia Elizabeth Landon
Topics: Grief
It is very pleasant to follow one’s inclinations; but unfortunately, we cannot follow them all: they are like the teeth sown by Cadmus—they spring up, get in each other’s way, and fight.
—Letitia Elizabeth Landon
It is said that ridicule is the test of truth; but it is never applied except when we wish to deceive ourselves—when if we cannot exclude the light, we would fain draw the curtain before it. The sneer springs out of the wish to deny; and wretched must that state of mind be, that wishes to take refuge in doubt.
—Letitia Elizabeth Landon
Ah tell me not that memory sheds gladness over the past; what is recalled by faded flowers save that they did not last?
—Letitia Elizabeth Landon
Topics: Remembrance
Praise is sometimes a good thing for the diffident and despondent. It teaches them properly to rely on the kindness of others.
—Letitia Elizabeth Landon
Topics: Praise
Few save the poor feel for the poor.
—Letitia Elizabeth Landon
Topics: Poverty
Alas, we make a ladder of our thoughts, where angels step, but sleep ourselves at the foot; our high resolves look down upon our slumbering acts.
—Letitia Elizabeth Landon
Topics: Thought
Were it not better to forget than to remember and regret?
—Letitia Elizabeth Landon
Topics: Regret
O love! thine essence is thy purity! Breathe one unhallowed breath upon thy flame and it is gone forever, and but leaves a sullied vase,—its pure light lost in shame.
—Letitia Elizabeth Landon
Topics: Love
Restraint is the golden rule of enjoyment.
—Letitia Elizabeth Landon
Topics: Enjoyment
I have no parting sigh to give, so take my parting smile.
—Letitia Elizabeth Landon
How disappointment tracks the steps of hope.
—Letitia Elizabeth Landon
Topics: Disappointment
No thoroughly occupied man was ever yet very miserable.
—Letitia Elizabeth Landon
Topics: Occupation, Happiness, Busy
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
- Lady Mary Wortley Montagu English Aristocrat, Poet
- Pamela Hansford Johnson British Novelist, Critic
- Anne Bradstreet American Poet
- Elizabeth Barrett Browning English Poet
- Christina Rossetti English Poet
- Frances Ridley Havergal English Anglican Poet
- Jane Austen English Novelist
- Mary Webb British Novelist
- Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton British Author, Politician
- Philip Larkin English Poet
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