Life & Wisdom Quote by Walter Savage Landor

A petty feud needs two willing egos; Landor’s line yanks the second ego out of the equation and calls it virtue. “I strove with none” isn’t meekness so much as refusal: a deliberate withdrawal from the noisy economy of rivalries. Then comes the sting in the tail: “for none was worth my strife.” It’s not pacifism; it’s selective contempt. The sentence carries the poise of someone who wants credit for peace while keeping his superiority intact.

The rhetoric works because it’s built like a moral maxim and delivered like a verdict. The semicolon splits the posture from the justification, letting the speaker appear serene before revealing the aristocratic premise beneath it. “Strove” and “strife” echo each other, turning conflict into something almost artisanal - a craft he could practice, if the material were better. The implication is that the world offered him only small opponents, unworthy causes, second-rate arguments.

Context matters: Landor lived in an era that prized combative letters, salon politics, and public intellectual skirmishes, and he himself was famously quarrelsome. That biographical friction gives the line its extra charge. Read straight, it’s an epitaph of stoic restraint; read with Landor in mind, it’s a self-serving rewrite, a way to frame isolation as principled discernment. Either way, the quote flatters a modern fantasy: that you can opt out of cultural warfare and still “win” by refusing to play - while quietly insisting you were always too good for the game.