Letitia Elizabeth Landon quotes - page 32
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.
Letitia Elizabeth Landon
Many and opposite are the lots in life, and unequal are the portions which they measure out to the children of earth. We cannot agree with those who contend that the difference after all is but in outward seeming. Such an assertion is often the result of thoughtlessness - sometimes the result of selfishness. It is one of the good points of human nature, that it revolts against human suffering. Few there are who can witness pain, whether of mind or of body, without pity, and the desire to alleviate ; but such is our infirmity of purpose, that a little suffices to turn us aside from assistance. Indolence, difficulties, and contrary interests come in the way of sympathy, and then we desire to excuse our apathy to ourselves. It is a comfortable doctrine to suppose that the evil is made up by some mysterious allotment of good ; it is an excuse for non-interference, and we let conscience sleep over our own enjoyments, taking it for granted others have them also - though how we know not.
Letitia Elizabeth Landon
The favourite volume whose reading we commend, is inevitably connected with ourselves - it must bring to our image those lonely hours when the recurrence of an image has such influence - it invests that image with the associations of poetry and fiction, and thus redeems it from the common-place of ordinary life. There is also the sympathy of taste - and how much may be inferred from a passage pencilled originally for no other eyes but our own. Then, too, a book is the prettiest stepping stone to a correspondence ; it seems such a simple thing to write a note of thanks, and so natural to add some slight remark on the author ; and how often is the criticism of an author's sentiments but the expression of our own !
Letitia Elizabeth Landon
We all know that there is evil in the world - we read of it - we hear of it - but we never think of its entering our own charmed circle. Look round our circle of acquaintance; how it would startle us to be asked to name one whom we thought capable of crime; how much more so to find that crime had been committed by one near and dear to our inmost heart. What a moral revulsion would such a discovery produce - how weak we should find ourselves under such a trial - how soon we should begin to disconnect the offender and the offence ; then, for the first time, we should begin to understand the full force of temptation, and to allow for its fearful strength ; and should we not begin to excuse what had never before seemed capable of palliation?
Letitia Elizabeth Landon
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.
Letitia Elizabeth Landon
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.
Letitia Elizabeth Landon
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.”.
Letitia Elizabeth Landon
