Top 15 Letitia Elizabeth Landon Quotes

I do not believe that affection can exist with truth, without the ideal, and without blending with itself all that is best and most earnest in our nature.

The history of most fictions would be far stranger than the fictions themselves ; but it would be a dark and sad chronicle. Half the works that constitute the charm of our leisure, that give their own interest to the long November evening, or add to the charm of a summer noon beneath the greenwood tree, are the offspring of poverty and of pain. ... How often is the writer obliged to put his own trouble, his suffering, or his sorrow aside, to finish the task ! The hand may tremble, the eyes fill with unbidden tears, and the temples throb with feverish pain, yet how often is there some hard and harsh necessity, which says, "the work must be done.”

A gay temper is like a bright day ; true, it may have its faults — a little petulance, a little wilfulness — the flush may be too ready in the cheek, and the flash too prompt in the eye ; still these are only trifles to be pardoned, and we like that all the better in which we have something to forgive.

Youth is frank, eager, and prone to believe in the good ; it looks round, and it sees flowers ; it looks up and sees stars ; evil appears impossible, because it does not seem to be in ourselves. It remains for after and weary years to teach us, that even the young and the innocent may be led into crime by the strong influence of temptation. Passion first, and interest afterwards, lures the feet of men into dark and crooked paths, which none in earlier and holier hours deemed they could tread. We may have been often deceived, but it is not until we ourselves begin to deceive that we dread deceit.

It is not in the calm and measured paths of to day that we see the more bold and pronounced characters, whose outlines have been rough-hewn by the strong hand of necessity ; yet to such troubled times often belong the development of our noblest and best qualities — the stormy gulf of Ormus throws up the finest pearls. It is not in the season of tranquility that we know aught of the generous devotion, the fertility of resource, and the forgetfulness of self often shown in the hour of trial. When the French revolution broke out, how many, only accustomed to indolence, luxury, and custom, showed that "there was iron in the rose ;" and, whether at the call of duty or of affection, were prepared to bear even to the uttermost, and to exert a fortitude till then undreamed of.

In the very lowest class it is well to be bred up amid those scenes wherein our future is cast ; nothing ever supplies the place of those early associations — nothing ever knits the heart to the place of its birth like the remembrances of childhood — nothing can give the entire knowledge of a people, but having been brought up among them.

What a strange page in human history is that of social distinction ; no people so savage but they have a sort of fashion. Even among the wild people in whose country I am now writing, there are all the small distinctions of small gentility — for example, it is not "comme il faut to wear silk."

The Scotch are too cautious to be witty — they take thought beforehand of their answers ; they are not people of impulse, and wit is an impulse. "It springs spontaneous if it spring." But then they have humour, rich, racy, sly humour, full of national character, and nearly allied to pathos.

No book is fairly judged till it is read twice, and at distant periods. It is curious to note the variation of taste in ourselves. I can remember I devoured the story keenly, dwelt on all that partook of sentiment, and never questioned the depth of any remark. I now find that I take chief interest in what brings out character. I enter more into the humourous, and am every now and then tempted to analyse the truth of a deduction. I think more over what I am reading, and delight more in connecting the world of fiction with that of reality.

How different too would the real character be from that which is assumed ; how little often do the most intimate know of each other. But the difference that the stranger might discover is nothing to that which we trace in ourselves.

I believe that more women are disappointed in marriage than men ; a woman gives the whole of her heart — the man only gives the remains of his, and very often there is only a little left. Besides his idol is rarely so much the work of his own hands as her's ; at the end of the first year she may ask, where are the picturesque and ennobling qualities with which she invested her lover? in nine cases out of ten echo will indeed answer “where."

The timid temper lives in perpetual terror, the nobler one braces itself to endure when ever the appointed time shall come.

Fiction is but moulding together the materials collected by every day, in real as well as imagined life ; the highest order of excellence carries the impulse along with it. Nature and fortune have this earth for their place of contention, and the victory is too often with the latter.

Few are the beliefs, still fewer the superstitions of to-day. We pretend to account for everything, till we do not believe enough for that humility so essential to moral discipline. But the dark creed of the fatalist still holds its ground — there is that within us, which dares not deny what, in the still depths of the soul, we feel to have a mysterious predominance. To a certain degree we controul our own actions — we have the choice of right or wrong ; but the consequences, the fearful consequences, lie not with us. Let any one look upon the most important epochs of his life ; how little have they been of his own making — how one slight thing has led on to another, till the result has been the very reverse of our calculations. Our emotions, how little are they under our own controul ! how often has the blanched lip, or the flushed cheek, betrayed what the will was strong to conceal ! Of all our sensations, love is the one which has most the stamp of Fate. What a mere chance usually leads to our meeting the person destined to alter the whole current of our life. What a mystery even to ourselves the influence which they exercise over us. Why should we feel so differently towards them, to what we ever felt before ? An attachment is an epoch in existence — it leads to casting off old ties, that, till then, had seemed our dearest ; it begins new duties ; often, in a woman especially, changes the whole character ; and yet, whether in its beginning, its continuance or its end, love is as little within our power as the wind that passes, of which no man knows whither it goeth or whence it comes.

If you give an opinion in favour of one, you still offend both ; for it is a physological quality in quarrels conjugal, that though each considers the other to blame, they will not allow you to think so too ; moreover, the chances are, that, in your own private opinion, they are both wrong — a most unpopular verdict to pronounce.