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Merit has rarely risen of itself, but a pebble or a twig is often quite sufficient for it to spring from to the highest ascent. There is usually some baseness before there is any elevation.

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
Merit
Twig
Rarely
Baseness
Sufficient
Pebble
Spring
Twigs
Usually
Ascent
Highest
Pebbles
Quite
Elevation
Often
Risen

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Sculpture and painting are moments of life poetry is life itself.
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Ah what avails the sceptred race, Ah what the form divine! What every virtue, every grace! Rose Aylmer, all were thine. Rose Aylmer, whom these wakeful eyes May weep, but never see, A night of memories and of sighs I consecrate to thee.
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Cruelty in all countries is the companion of anger but there is only one, and never was another on the globe, where she coquets both with anger and mirth.
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I strove with none, for none was worth my strife. Nature I loved and, next to Nature, Art: I warm'd both hands before the fire of life It sinks, and I am ready to depart.
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Next in criminality to him who violates the laws of his country, is he who violates the language.
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Immoderate power, like other intemperance, leaves the progeny weaker and weaker, until nature as in compassion covers it with her mantle and it is seen no more.
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Harmonious words render ordinary ideas acceptable less ordinary, pleasant novel and ingenious ones, delightful. As pictures and statues, and living beauty, too, show better by music-light, so is poetry irradiated, vivified, glorified', and raised into immortal life by harmony.
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Piety--warm, soft, and passive as the ether round the throne of Grace--is made callous and inactive by kneeling too much.
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The habit of pleasing by flattery makes a language soft the fear of offending by truth makes it circuitous and conventional.
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Men universally are ungrateful towards him who instructs them, unless, in the hours or in the intervals of instruction, he presents a sweet-cake to their self-love.
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No good writer was ever long neglected no great man overlooked by men equally great. Impatience is a proof of inferior strength, and a destroyer of what little there may be.
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The sublime is contained in a grain of dust.
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We fancy we suffer from ingratitude, while in reality we suffer from self-love.
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I see the rainbow in the sky, the dew upon the grass I see them, and I ask not why they glimmer or they pass. With folded arms I linger not to call them back 'twere vain: In this, or in some other spot, I know they'll shine again.
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There are proud men of so much delicacy that it almost conceals their pride, and perfectly excuses it.
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Wisdom consisteth not in knowing many things, nor even in knowing them thoroughly but in choosing and in following what conduces the most certainly to our lasting happiness and true glory.
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The tomb is the pedestal of greatness. I make a distinction between God's great and the king's great.
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