Letitia Elizabeth Landon Quotes - Page 6

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.

All sweeping assertions are erroneous.

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.

Youth is a season that has no repose.

Society is like a large piece of frozen water; and skating well is the great art of social life.

To this hour, the great science and duty of politics is lowered by the petty leaven of small and personal advantage.

The lover and the physician are each popular from the same cause - we talk to them of nothing but ourselves.

In sad truth, half our forebodings of our neighbors are but our own wishes, which we are ashamed to utter in any other form.

Nothing more strongly marks the insufficiency of luxuries than the ease with which people grow accustomed to them; they are rather known by their want than by their presence. The word 'blasé' has been coined expressly for the use of the upper classes.

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

Our first love-letter ... There is so much to be said, and which no words seems exactly to say - the dread of saying too much is so nicely balanced by the fear of saying too little. Hope borders on presumption, and fear on reproach.

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

And this is woman's fate: all her affections are called into life by winning flatteries, and then thrown back upon themselves to perish; and her heart, her trusting heart, filled with weak tenderness, is left to bleed or break!

Eyes that droop like summer flowers.

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

The heart's hushed secret in the soft dark eye.

We are rarely wrong when we act from impulse.

A woman's fame is the tomb of her happiness.

My heart is its own grave!

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.

One of the greatest of all mental pleasures is to have our thoughts often divined: ever entered into with sympathy.

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

How disappointment tracks the steps of hope.

The dream on the pillow, That flits with the day, The leaf of the willow A breath wears away; The dust on the blossom, The spray on the sea; Ay,--ask thine own bosom-- Are emblems of thee.

I never cast a flower away, A gift of one who car'd for me; A flower--a faded flower, But it was done reluctantly.