Quote

Wise or unwise, who doubts for a moment that contentment is the cause of happiness? Yet the inverse is true: we are contented because we are happy, and not happy because we are contented. Well-regulated minds may be satisfied with a small portion of happiness none can be happy with a small portion of content.

Walter Savage Landor

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Walter Savage Landor
Age: 89 †
Born: 1775
Born: January 30
Died: 1864
Died: September 17
Poet
Writer
Warwick
Warwickshire
May
Doubt
Portions
Wells
Causes
Contentment
Well
Small
Content
Inverse
Mind
Happiness
Satisfied
Unwise
Happy
None
Regulated
Moment
Minds
Contented
Moments
Cause
Portion
True
Wise
Doubts

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Every sect is a moral check on its neighbour. Competition is as wholesome in religion as in commerce.
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Absurdities are great or small in proportion to custom or insuetude.
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Moroseness is the evening of turbulence.
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In the hours of distress and misery, the eyes of every mortal turn to friendship in the hours of gladness and conviviality, what is our want? It is friendship. When the heart overflows with gratitude, or with any other sweet or sacred sentiment, what is the word to which it would give utterance? A friend.
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Why cannot we be delighted with an author, and even feel a predilection for him, without a dislike of others? An admiration of Catullus or Virgil, of Tibullus or Ovid, is never to be heightened by a discharge of bile on Horace.
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Those who in living fill the smallest space, In death have often left the greatest void.
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When a woman hath ceased to be quite the same to us, it matters little how different she becomes.
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An ingenious mind feels in unmerited praise the bitterest reproof.
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Little men build up great ones, but the snow colossus soon melts the good stand under the eye of God, and therefore stand.
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Teach him to live unto God and unto thee and he will discover that women, like the plants in woods, derive their softness and tenderness from the shade.
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When we play the fool, how wideThe theatre expands! beside,How long the audience sits before us!How many prompters! what a chorus!
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Those who speak against the great do not usually speak from morality, but from envy.
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Cruelty is no more the cure of crimes than it is the cure of sufferings compassion, in the first instance, is good for both I have known it to bring compunction when nothing else would.
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We listen to those whom we know to be of the same opinion as ourselves, and we call them wise for being of it but we avoid such as differ from us.
Walter Savage Landor
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As we sometimes find one thing while we are looking for another, so, if truth escaped me, happiness and contentment fell in my way.
Walter Savage Landor
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In honest truth, a name given to a man is no better than a skin given to him what is not natively his own falls off and comes to nothing.
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Justice is often pale and melancholy but Gratitude, her daughter, is constantly in the flow of spirits and the bloom of loveliness.
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A great man knows the value of greatness he dares not hazard it, he will not squander it.
Walter Savage Landor
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States, like men, have their growth, their manhood, their decrepitude, their decay.
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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.
Walter Savage Landor