Letitia Elizabeth Landon
Alas! we give our own coloring to the actions of others.Collection: Giving
Repentance is a one-faced Janus, ever looking to the past.Collection: Past
From religion ... they will learn the only true lesson of equality - the conviction that our destinies are not in our own hands; they will see that no situation in life is without its share of suffering; - and this perpetual reference to a higher power ought equally to teach the rich humility, and the poor devotion.Collection: Humility
It is said that ridicule is the test of truth: it is never applied, but when we wish to deceive ourselves.Collection: Wish
The lover and the physician are each popular from the same cause - we talk to them of nothing but ourselves.Collection: Physicians
Strange the affection which clings to inanimate objects - objects which cannot even know our love! But it is not return that constitutes the strength of an attachment.Collection: Attachment
How beautiful, how buoyant, and glad is morning!Collection: Beautiful
Knowledge is much like dust - it sticks to one, one does not know how.Collection: Knowledge
It is curious how inseparable eating and kindness are with some people.Collection: Kindness
Whenever I hear a man talking of the advantages of our ill-used sex, I look upon it as the prelude to some new act of authority.Collection: Sex
We are ourselves our happiness.Collection: Healing
words alike make the destiny of empires and of individuals. Ambition, love, hate, interest, vanity, have words for their engines, and need none more powerful. Language is a fifth element - the one by which all the others are swayed.Collection: Powerful
The truth is, we never make for others the allowance we make for ourselves; and we should deny even our own words, could we hear them spoken by another.Collection: Truth Is
The old proverb, applied to fire and water, may with equal truth be applied to the imagination - it is a good servant, but a bad master.Collection: Fire
Curiosity is its own suicide.Collection: Suicide
To be rude is as good as being clever.Collection: Clever
there is nothing so easy as to be wise for others; a species of prodigality, by-the-by - for such wisdom is wholly wasted.Collection: Wise
The truth is, we like to talk over our disasters, because they are ours; and others like to listen, because they are not theirs.Collection: Trouble
I do not think that life has a suspense more sickening than that of expecting a letter which does not come.Collection: Thinking
Consistency is a human word, but it certainly expresses nothing human.Collection: Change
though fortune's wheel is generally on the turn, sometimes when it gets into the mud, it sticks there.Collection: Destiny
Imagination is to love what gas is to the balloon-that which raises it from earth.Collection: Imagination
the blessings of matrimony, like those of poverty, belong rather to philosophy than reality.Collection: Philosophy
In marriage, as in chemistry, opposites have often an attraction.Collection: Opposites
to the many, witticisms not only require to be explained, like riddles, but are also like new shoes, which people require to wear many times before they get accustomed to them.Collection: New Shoes
it is a curious fact, but one which all experience owns, that people do not desire so much to appear better, as to appear different from what they really are.Collection: Thinking
How very satisfactory those discussions must be, where each party retains their own opinion!Collection: Party
Every other species of talent carries with it its eternity; we enjoy the work of the poet, the painter, the sculptor, only as thousands will do after us; but the actor - his memory is with his generation, and that passes away.Collection: Memories
The very effort to forget teaches us to remember.Collection: Effort
Anticipation is a bad sleeping draught.Collection: Sleep
Farewell's a bitter word to say.Collection: Farewell
My heart is its own grave!Collection: Heart
no hour arrives so soon as the one we dread.Collection: Fear
Fame is bought by happiness.Collection: Fame
Are we not like the actor of old times, who wore his mask so long his face took its likeness?Collection: Long
I have a respect for family pride. If it be a prejudice, it is a prejudice in its most picturesque shape. But I hold it is connected with some of the noblest feelings in our nature.Collection: Family
I cannot see why a taste for the country should be held so very indispensable a requisite for excellence; but really people talk of it as if it were a virtue, and as if an opposite opinion was, to say the least of it, very immoral.Collection: Country
It is amazing how much a thought expands and refines by being put into speech: I should think it could hardly know itself.Collection: Thinking
No thoroughly occupied man was ever yet very miserable.[to feel unhappy you need the time to consider how your lot could be better]Collection: Gratitude
In sad truth, half our forebodings of our neighbors are but our own wishes, which we are ashamed to utter in any other form.Collection: Wish
Whatever people in general do not understand, they are al ways prepared to dislike; the incomprehensible is always the obnoxious.Collection: People
Good taste is his religion, his morality, his standard, and his test.Collection: Tests
Of all false assertions that ever went into the world under the banner of a great name and the mail armor of a well-turned phrase, Locke's comparison of the mind to a blank sheet of paper appears to me among the most untrue.Collection: Names
anybody's applause is better than nobody's.Collection: Applause
A preface is a species of literary luxury, where an author, like a lover, is privileged to be egotistical.Collection: Book
Business before pleasure.Collection: Business
It is strange what society will endure from its idols.Collection: Idols
Affection exaggerates its own offenses.Collection: Affection