Life & Wisdom Quote by Walter Savage Landor

Austere as a chiseled motto, "Consult duty not events" is Landor compressing an entire moral worldview into five words. The verb choice matters: you consult a person, an authority, a conscience. Events are noisy, seductive, and often falsely instructive; they feel like evidence, but they can be little more than weather. Duty, by contrast, is positioned as the only reliable adviser: steady, inward, not subject to the market of outcomes.

The subtext is a rebuke to a culture that confuses contingency with command. "Events" can justify anything after the fact: we did it because circumstances forced us, because history turned, because the moment demanded it. Landor refuses that alibi. He implies that moral agency is not a reaction to headlines but a discipline that precedes them. If you let events lead, you become legible to power and fashion; if you let duty lead, you become stubbornly ungovernable.

Context sharpens the edge. Landor is a Romantic-era writer living through revolutions, Napoleonic upheaval, and the long aftershock of political modernity, when "history" starts to feel like an unstoppable machine. His line pushes back against that fatalism. It also reads as a critique of opportunism in public life: politicians and intellectuals riding the curve of events, calling adaptation "prudence". Landor offers a colder, braver ethic: act from principle first, and accept that outcomes may not flatter you. It’s not comfort; it’s a demand.