Life & Wisdom Quote by Walter Savage Landor

A poet’s flex disguised as a moral lesson: Landor frames literature not as ornament but as a kind of wealth that refuses to be mismanaged. In the early 19th century, when Britain’s power was entangled with empire, inheritance, and the brittle status of “property,” he reaches for an accounting metaphor that his audience would recognize instantly. Money can be blown, titles can decay, estates can be sold off in a bad marriage or a worse investment. The “writing of the wise,” by contrast, slips past the usual mechanisms of squander.

That claim carries a sharp subtext about what posterity deserves and what it habitually does. Landor isn’t sentimental about future generations; he assumes they’re perfectly capable of wrecking whatever they’re handed. The line flatters the reader into joining the “wise” while also scolding the heirs who treat culture like a trust fund. His trick is to make wisdom sound practical: reading becomes a form of fiscal responsibility, and authorship becomes the most durable kind of capital.

The phrasing does extra work. “Only riches” is an audacious exclusivity clause, the kind poets love: it elevates the intangible without denying the reality of material life. “Cannot squander” is the kicker, because it shifts agency away from heirs and onto the medium itself. Books, unlike fortunes, can be ignored, misread, even banned - but they’re hard to fully destroy. Landor is betting on textual survival as a quiet rebuke to the era’s obsession with legacy. In his hands, permanence isn’t marble; it’s ink.