Wit & Attitude Quote by Walter Savage Landor

Landor’s line has the clean, cold snap of a neoclassical epigram: it denies you the comforting fictions on both ends of the timeline. “No easy path leading out of life” refuses the sentimental exit ramps people invent - heroic deaths, noble endings, painless dissolves into meaning. Death isn’t framed as tragedy or triumph; it’s framed as logistics. There’s no gentle door, no neat wrap-up, no narrative release.

Then he tightens the screw: “few easy ones that lie within it.” The subtext is not misery for misery’s sake, but a moral correction aimed at the reader’s laziness. Landor was a poet formed by the long shadow of revolution and reaction, when grand ideals kept colliding with stubborn human nature. In that world, the promise of simplicity - politically, spiritually, personally - looks like a scam. The sentence carries an Enlightenment distrust of wishful thinking, but also a Romantic bruising: experience is friction, and the self is shaped by resistance.

The quote works because it’s structured like a trap. You arrive expecting consolation about life’s hardships and get a broader indictment: even the desire for “easy” is itself a misunderstanding of what living is. Landor’s diction is plain, almost bureaucratic, which makes the bleakness persuasive rather than theatrical. It’s a line meant to sober you up, not to comfort you - a reminder that difficulty isn’t a detour from life, it’s most of the road.