Works By Letitia Elizabeth Landon

"Sooner or later a woman must inevitably despise the man who takes money from her. Before a man can do this, there must be those radical defects of character to which even kindness cannot always be blind. He must be a moral coward, because he exposes her to those annoyances which he has not courage enough to face himself; he must be mean, because he submits to an obligation from the inferior and the weak; and he must be ungrateful, because ingratitude is the necessary consequence of receiving favours of which we are ashamed. Money is the great breaker-up of love and friendship ;"

"[From Lord Norbourne]: Wit only gains you the reputation of being hardhearted, which it is very well to be in reality, but not to have the reputation of being. It shocks people's little innocent prejudices, and these I always respect when I can. Indeed, the only character I ever found of any use to man, was that of having no character at all."

"[From Lord Norbourne]: Youth is prone to admire ; but it is odd how, in a few years, we discover the defects of our demigods."

"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 an harbour, here a rock — The one we will attain, the other shun :" And we do neither."

"[From Lord Norbourne]: I do not often give advice ; first, because it is a bad habit that of giving any thing ; and, secondly, because I always think of the ambassador’s answer to Oliver's declaration, 'that if the court of Spain cut off his head, he would send them the heads of every Spaniard in his dominions.’ 'Yes, please your highness,' returned the diplomatist, 'but among them all there may not be one to fit my shoulders.' In like manner, with all our choice of other people’s experience, there is never any that suits us but our own."

"[From Lord Norbourne]: As little do I think that your country pursuits deserve to engross your time. Life was given for something better than sitting after fish, walking after birds, and riding after hares.”"

"[From Lord Norbourne]: Talents of this high and imaginative order, seem to me rather given to benefit others than their possessor. Their harvest is in the future, not the present. Their brains produce the golden ore, which commoner hands mould to the daily purposes of life.""

"But dreams, which fill the waking eye With deeper spells than sleep, When hours unnumbered pass us by ; From such we wake and weep. We wake, but not to sleep again, The heart has lost its youth ; The morning light that wakes us then, Cold, calm, and stern, is truth."

"The affection of family ties has the character on it of childhood in which it was formed ; it is free, open, confiding; it has none of the delicacy of friendship, or the romance of sentiment : you know that success ought to be in common, and that you have but one interest."

"Nothing can compensate to a woman for the want of exterior attraction. There is a nameless fascination about beauty, which seems, like all fairy gifts, crowded into one. It wins without an effort, and obtains credit for possessing every thing else. How many mortifications, from its very cradle, has the unpleasing exterior to endure !"

"… there are no weaknesses which we so thoroughly despise as those to which ourselves have yielded; and no faults strike us so forcibly as our own, when they are past."

"No two people are more different in outward seeming, than a man sometimes grows to differ from himself."

"To me there is no season so lovely as the autumn. There is a gayety about the spring with which I have no anything for its perpetual revival of leaf and bloom is too great a contrast to the inner world, where so many feelings lie barren, and so many hopes withered. There is an activity about it, from which the wearied spirits shrink; and a joyousness, which but makes you turn more sadly upon yourself; but about autumn there is a tender melancholy inexpressibly soothing ; decay is around, but such is in your own heart. There is a languor in the air which encourages your own, and the poetry of memory is in every drooping flower and falling leaf. The very magnificence of its Assyrian array is touched with the light of imagination : even while you watch it, it passes away as your brightest hopes have done before."

"Even into philosophy is carried the deeper truth of the heart—and how many inconsistencies are at once understood ! We grow more indulgent, more pitying ; and one sweet weakness of our own leads to so much indulgence for others. We doubt, however, whether the term weakness be not misapplied in this case. If there be one emotion that redeems our humanity by stirring all that is generous and unselfish within us, that awakens all the poetry of our nature, and that makes us believe in that heaven of which it bears the likeness, it is love : love, spiritual, devoted, and eternal ; love, that softens the shadow of the valley of death, to welcome us after to its own and immortal home."

"Love is a new intelligence entered into the being ; it is the softest, but the most subtle light ; in all experience it deceives itself; but how many truths does it teach,—how much knowledge does it impart ! It makes us alive to a thousand feelings, of whose very existence, till then, we had not dreamed. The poet's page has a new magic : we comprehend all that had before seemed graceful exaggeration ; we now find that poetry falls short of what it seeks to express ; and we take a new delight in the musical language that seems made for tenderness."

"I do not ask to offer thee A timid love like mine ; I lay it, as the rose is laid, On some immortal shrine."

"We may, we ought, to be merciful to others ; to ourselves, we should be only just."

"[PS to a Lady Marchmont letter]: Lord Marchmont, whenever he sees me writing, sends you a message of equal length and civility. Once named, it will do for always. You can keep it by you like a stock of frozen provision."

"Hard are life's early steps; and but that youth Is buoyant, confident, and strong in hope, Men would behold its threshold, and despair."

"[From Lady Mary Wortley Montague]: We might have had hearts in our cradles ; but, as I don't pretend to remember mine, I cannot say. Perhaps at sixteen, too, there is a sort of imagination of one ; but it is a phantom which flits at the cockcrowing of reality. We soon learn, 'That the worth of any thing is just as much as it will bring :’ and we value a lover by the estimate of others, not by our own. Our own suffrage is nothing."

"A great sorrow forgets every thing but itself; but little sorrows exaggerate themselves and each other."

"[From Lady Mary Wortley Montague within Lady Marchmont’s letters]: All men are rascals to women, and all women rascals to each other."

"Amid the many contrasts produced by our forced unions of nature and art, there is no contrast so strange as that between the exterior and the internal world of society."

"I believe all the good that is sometimes said of human nature when I remember the feelings of youth; and it is this principle explains why men whose "hearts are dry as summer's dust," often delight in the society of the very young. The sympathy is awakened by memory."

"[From Lady Mary Wortley Montague]: Love is society’s Alexander the Great, only intent on making conquests ; and we care for no captives but those who follow the track of our triumphs in chains.""

"It (London) is the most real place in the world ; you will inevitably be brought to your level."

"The first step towards establishing pretensions of any kind, is to believe firmly in them yourself: faith is very catching, and half the beauty-reputations of which I hear have originated with the possessors."

"Alas ! why should our lot in life be made, Before we know that life ? Experience comes, But comes too late. If I could now recall All that I now regret, how different Would be my choice !"

"[From Lady Marchmont’s journal]: There are some people who ought never to dream of commonplacing the ideal with themselves. The world of the heart is essentially ideal : it collects all poetry,—innate and acquired ; it is fastidious, dreaming, and delicate; and is a question of taste as well as of feeling ; and it is to this world that love belongs. It should be kept as far apart from lower life as that mysterious world of stars and clouds on which I am now gazing."

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

"[From Lady Mary Wortley Montague within Lady Marchmont’s letters]: Friendship is just an innocent delusion, to round a period in a moral essay."

"A history of how and where works of imagination have been produced, would be more extraordinary than even the works themselves."

"[From Lady Marchmont’s journal]: Really, being in love appears a pleasant state of existence ; it is always agreeable to know that there is another thinking of you, whether you think of them or not. I like the idea of there being one individual leaving your room who will bear away every look you have given, every word you have said,—it gives importance to them in your own eyes ; and yet I have often marvelled what people see in each other. Even as a book is read through, people are talked through."

"[From Lady Marchmont’s journal]: … I hate the word "ought"—it always implies something dull, cold, and commonplace. The "ought nots" of life are its pleasantest things."

"—one woman—always knows how to plague another;"

"Vanity ! guiding power, 'tis thine to rule Statesman and vestryman—the knave or fool. The Macedonian crossed Hydaspes' wave, Fierce as the storm, and gloomy as the grave. Urged by the thought, what would Athenians say, When next they gathered on a market-day ? And the same spirit that induced his toil, Leads on the cook, to stew, and roast, and boil : Whether the spice be mixed—the flag unfurled— Each deems their task the glory of the world."

"[From Lady Marchmont’s Letters to Sir Jasper]: What a duty to one's self it is to be young, vain, and pretty ! but the middle quality is the most important. Vanity is a cloak that wraps us up comfortably, and a drapery which sets us off to the best advantage ; and its great merit is, that it suits itself to every sort of circumstance."

"I never could enter into the passion for china; it is an affection born of ostentation. Those stiff shepherdesses ; those ill-shaped teapots ; those monsters, which take every shape but a graceful one ; those little, round cups make no appeal to my imagination; they suggest nothing but ideas of trade ; they are redolent of the auction-room. Moreover, I detest bargains ; the bargain can only be one, because either the first purchaser is dead, or ruined. He has left either heirs or creditors, each equally greedy, careless, and impatient or, if these toys be disposed of during a lifetime, such sale only tells a common tale of, first extravagance, then want ; fancies indulged thoughtlessly, to end miserably. A bargain is a social evil ; one man's loss, tempting another man's cupidity."

"[From Lady Marchmont’s Letters to Sir Jasper]: Chloe believed that he had immortalised himself by a representation of the war of the Titans against the gods. Unfortunately, they were higher than even the room ; and Lord Marchmont refused to comply with the wishes of the artiste, and to take down his splendidly painted ceiling to admit of the dessert."

"After all, wit is something like sunshine in a frost—very sharp, very bright, but very cold and uncomfortable."

"There is to age something so enlivening in the company of youth, unconsciously it shares the cheerfulness it witnesses, and hopes with the hopes around, in that sympathy which is the kindliest part of our nature."

"Not to the present is our hour confined, The great and shadowy future is assigned To be the glorious empire of the mind. The past was once the future and it wrought In the high presence of on-looking thought; All that we have, was by its efforts brought. To-day creates to-morrow, and the tree Of good or ill grows in past hours, what we Make for the future— certain is to be."

"… of all duties, forgetfulness is the hardest to fulfil. The very effort to forget teaches us to remember."

"[From Lady Mary Wortley Montague]: Ah, we make laws, and we follow customs. By the first we cut off our own pleasures; and by the second, make ourselves answerable for the follies of others."

"… the absurdity of your husband comes too close for laughter, it may reflect a little on yourself—at all events on your taste for choosing him."

"[Of poets]: They gather from sorrow its sweetest emotions ; they repeat of hope but its noblest visions; they look on nature with an earnest love, which wins the power of making her hidden beauty visible; and they reproduce the passionate, the true, and the beautiful. Alas ! they themselves are not what they paint; the low want subdues the lofty will ; the small and present vanity interferes with the far and glorious aim : but still it is something to have looked beyond the common sphere where they were fated to struggle. They paid in themselves the bitter penalty of not realising their own ideal ; but mankind have to be thankful for the generous legacy of thought and harmony bequeathed by those who were among earth's proscribed and miserable. Fame is bought by happiness."

"It matters not its history—Love has wings, Like lightning, swift and fatal : and it springs, Like a wild flower, where it is least expected; Existing whether cherished or rejected."

"In the little, as in the great things of life, are to be found the type and sign of our immortality. Every hope that looks forward is pledge of the hereafter to which it refers. Who rests content with the present ? None. We have all deep within us a craving for the future. In childhood we anticipate youth ; in youth manhood ; in manhood old age ; and to what does that turn, but to a world beyond our own ? From the very first, the strong belief is nursed within us ; we look forward and forward, till that which was desire grows faith. The to come is the universal heritage of mankind ; and he claims but a small part of his portion who looks not beyond the grave."

"Which was the true philosopher ?—the sage Who to the sorrows and the crimes of life Gave tears—or he who laughed at all he saw ?"

"Fear dwells around the absent—and our love For such grows all too anxious, too much filled With vain regrets, and fond inquietudes : We know not love till those we love depart."