Remarks by Letitia Elizabeth Landon

“Difficulty is as needful to appreciation as labour is to existence.”

Suggesting that effort and obstacles deepen our sense of value · Essay, The Female Portrait Gallery: Miss Wardour

“We appreciate no pleasures unless we are occasionally debarred from them.”

Suggesting that absence and restraint sharpen appreciation · Landoniana

“Advice generally does require some very powerful argument to be taken.”

A dry observation on humanity's reluctance to follow advice · Landoniana

“The difference between past grief and past joy is this: that if the grief recurred again to-day, we should feel it as bitterly as ever.”

Observing the remarkable persistence of remembered grief · Landoniana

“Light sufferings spring to the lips in words, and to the eyes in tears; but there is a pride in deep passion which guards its feelings from even the shadow of a surmise.”

Contrasting easily expressed troubles with suffering kept deeply private · Landoniana

“How little do even our most intimate friends know of us.”

Recognising the private depths that remain hidden even in close relationships · Landoniana

“The affection which clings to the home of our childhood is, though a simple, a sweet and purifying influence on the character.”

Connecting early attachment to home with lasting emotional character · Landoniana

“Of any great exertion in which the mind has part, the best reward is in the exertion itself.”

Valuing intellectual effort for its intrinsic satisfaction · Landoniana

“I believe that travelling is as much a passion as love, poetry, or ambition.”

Recognising exploration as a powerful form of human desire · Landoniana

“Believing, as I do, that falling in love goes by destiny, and that, of all affairs, those of the heart are those for which there is the least accounting.”

Presenting love as resistant to rational explanation · Landoniana

“Domestic dissension is the sacrilege of the heart.”

Condemning conflict that destroys the security of family affection · Landoniana

“Small evils make the worst part of great ones: it is so much easier to endure misfortune than to bear an inconvenience.”

Observing that everyday irritations can be harder to bear than great crises · Landoniana

“Nobody's experience ever suits us except our own.”

Wryly suggesting that wisdom borrowed from others rarely feels sufficient · Landoniana, from Romance and Reality

“The time which passes pleasantly passes lightly; days are remembered by their cares more than by their content.”

Reflecting on the unequal way happiness and trouble shape memory · Landoniana, from Romance and Reality

“Childhood, more than any other period, links its remembrance with inanimate objects, perhaps because its chief pleasures are derived from them.”

Observing how childhood memories become attached to places and objects · Landoniana, from Romance and Reality

“Hope is but the poetical name for that feverish restlessness which hurries over to-day for the sake of to-morrow.”

Offering a deliberately sceptical view of hope and expectation · Landoniana, from Romance and Reality

“This love of nature is divinely given to keep alive, even in the most toiling and world-worn existence, something of the imaginative and the apart.”

Seeing nature as a refuge for imagination amid ordinary labour · Essay, Female Portrait Gallery, No. I

“The height is only to be reached by a pathway of our own.”

Expressing the importance of originality in creative achievement · Essay, Female Portrait Gallery, No. I

“Indeed, there is no such thing as a school in literature; each great writer is his own original.”

Arguing that genuine literary distinction requires individuality · Essay, Female Portrait Gallery, No. I

“Why, the very element of poetry is faith—faith in the beautiful, the divine, and the true.”

Describing poetry as rooted in belief in beauty and truth · Essay, The Criticism of Chateaubriand

“Now a nation's character is in its literature.”

Seeing literature as an expression of a people's collective character · Essay, The Criticism of Chateaubriand

“We are forced into making allowances, by seeing how much we need that they should be made for ourselves.”

Connecting tolerance for others with awareness of our own imperfections · Essay, The Criticism of Chateaubriand

“Communication is in itself civilization; we wear away our own prejudices only by contact with those of others.”

Arguing that contact with others weakens prejudice and enlarges understanding · Essay, The Criticism of Chateaubriand

“Time is the great leveller, but he is also the sanctifier and the beautifier.”

Recognising how time both erases distinctions and transforms memory · Essay, The Criticism of Chateaubriand

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