Logan Pearsall Smith quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Logan Pearsall Smith

Logan Pearsall Smith Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Logan Pearsall Smith on Wise Famous Quotes.

I might give my life for my friend, but he had better not ask me to do up a parcel.

It takes a great man to give sound advice tactfully, but a greater to accept it graciously.

How can they say my life is not a success? Have I not for more than sixty years got enough to eat and escaped being eaten?

Yes there is a meaning; at least for me, there is one thing that matters - to set a chime of words tinkling in the minds of a few fastidious people.

The world is not unkind, and reprobates are worse than their reputations.

The word snob belongs to the sour-grape vocabulary.

The test of enjoyment is the remembrance which it leaves behind.

We need two kinds of acquaintances, one to complain to, while to the others we boast.

The test of a vocation is the love of the drudgery it involves.

Give me a bed and a book and I am happy.

A friend who loved perfection would be the perfect friend, did not that love shut his door on me.

I can't forgive my friends for dying; I don't find these vanishing acts of theirs at all amusing.

Only among people who think no evil can Evil monstrously flourish.

He who goes against the fashion is himself its slave.

Many of our daydreams would darken into nightmares, were there a danger of their coming true!

Uncultivated minds are not full of wild flowers, like uncultivated fields. Villainous weeds grow in them and they are the haunt of toads.

Style is a magic wand, and turns everything to gold that it touches.

Whiskey has killed more men than bullets, but most men would rather be full of whiskey than bullets.

What's more enchanting than the voices of young people, when you can't hear what they say?

All mirrors are magical mirrors, and we never see our faces in them.

Most people sell their souls, and live with a good conscience on the proceeds.

All my life, as down an abyss without a bottom. I have been pouring van loads of information into that vacancy of oblivion I call my mind.

I like to walk down Bond Street, thinking of all the things I don't desire.

It is the wretchedness of being rich that you have to live with rich people.

The newest books are those that never grow old.

We grow with years more fragile in body, but morally stouter, and can throw off the chill of a bad conscience almost at once.

I find a fascination, like the fascination for the moth of a star, in those who hold aloof and disdain me.

The ladies who try to keep their beauty are the ladies who lose it.

How often my soul visits the National Gallery, and how seldom

When elderly invalids meet with fellow-victims of their own ailments, then at last real conversation begins, and life is delicious.

A best-seller is the gilded tomb of a mediocre talent

When they come downstairs from their Ivory Towers, idealists are very apt to walk straight into the gutter.

There are people whose society I find delicious; but when I sit alone and think of them I shudder.

Those who talk on the razor-edge of double-meanings pluck the rarest blooms from the precipice on either side.

One can be bored until boredom becomes a mystical experience.

An echo of music, a face in the street, the wafer of the new moon, a wanton thought - only in the iridescence of things the vagabond soul is happy.

There are people who, like houses, are beautiful in dilapidation.

How awful to reflect that what people say of us is true!

Youth is the time for adventures of the body, but age for the triumphs of the mind.

This nice and subtle happiness of reading, this joy not chilled by age, this polite and unpunished vice, this selfish, serene life-long intoxication.

Our names are labels, plainly printed on the bottled essence of our past behavior.

Thank heavens, the sun has gone in and I don't have to go out and enjoy it.

There are few sorrows in which a good income is of no avail.

Friends such as we desire are dreams and fables, yet we never quite give up the hope of finding them.

If you want to be thought a liar, always tell the truth.

There are few sorrows, however poignant, in which a good income is of no avail.

The old know what they want; the young are sad and bewildered.

But man is above all a social and political animal; his relations with his fellow human beings form his most absorbing and important interest.

The great art of writing is the art of making people real to themselves with words.

People have a right to be shocked; the mention of unmentionable things is a kind of participation in them.

A slight touch of friendly malice and amusement towards those we love keeps our affections for them from turning flat.

Don't let young people tell you their aspirations; when they drop them they will drop you.

What is more mortifying than to feel that you have missed the plum for want of courage to shake the tree?

Growing old is not a gradual decline, but a series of drops, full of sorrow, from one ledge to another below it.

Don't tell friends their social faults; they will cure the fault and never forgive you.

The vitality of a new movement in Art must be gauged by the fury it arouses.

Eat with the rich, but go to the play with the poor, who are capable of joy.

If they lost the incredible conviction that they can change their wives or husbands, marriage would collapse at once.

Fine writers should split hairs together, and sit side by side, like friendly apes, to pick the fleas from each others fur.

What joy can the years bring half so sweet as the unhappiness they've taken away?

Don't laugh at a youth for his affectations; he is only trying on one face after another to find his own.

Every author, however modest, keeps a most outrageous vanity chained like a madman in the padded cell of his breast.

All our lives we are putting pennies - our most golden pennies - into penny-in-the-slot machines that are almost always empty.

If we shake hands with icy fingers, it is because we have burnt them so horribly before.

It's an odd thing about this universe that, though we all disagree with each other, we are all of us always in the right.

What I like in a good author is not what he says, but what he whispers.

It is a matter of life and death for married people to interrupt each others stories; for it they did not, they would burst.

Charming people live up to the very edge of their charm, and behave as outrageously as the world lets them.

To suppose as we all suppose, that we could be rich and not behave as the rich behave, is like supposing that we could drink all day and stay sober.

Those who set out to serve both God and Mammon soon discover that there is no God.

The denunciation of the young is a necessary part of the hygiene of older people, and greatly assists the circulation of the blood.

It is through the cracks in our brains that ecstasy creeps in.

How many of our daydreams would darken into nightmares
if there seemed any danger of their coming true!

The lusts and greeds of the body scandalize the Soul; but it has to come to heel.

The notion of making money by popular work, and then retiring to do good work, is the most familiar of all the devil's traps for artists.

How it infuriates a bigot, when he is forced to drag out his dark convictions!

Hearts that are delicate and kind and tongues that are neither - these make the finest company in the world

Self-respecting people do not care to peep at their reflections in unexpected mirrors, or to see themselves as others see them.

Solvency is entirely a matter of temperament and not of income.

Only those who get into scrapes with their eyes open can find the safe way out.

Money and sex are forces too unruly for our reason; they can only be controlled by taboos which we tamper with at our peril.

An improper mind is a perpetual feast.

There is more felicity on the far side of baldness than young men can possibly imagine.

What humbugs we are, who pretend to live for beauty, and never see the dawn!

All reformers, however strict their social conscience, live in houses just as big as they can pay for.

We should nourish our souls on the dew of Poesy, and manure them as well.

Happiness is a wine of the rarest vintage, and seems insipid to a vulgar taste.

You cannot be both fashionable and first-rate

So, I never lose a sense of the whimsical and perilous charm of daily life, with its meetings and words and accidents.

Married women are kept women, and theyare beginning to find it out.

For souls in growth, great quarrels are great emancipations.