Alexander Smith Quotes

Death is the ugly fact which Nature has to hide, and she hides it well.

Christmas is the day that holds all time together.

The greatness of an artist or a writer does not depend on what he has in common with other artists and writers, but on what he has peculiar to himself.

The saddest thing that befalls a soul is when it loses faith in god and woman.

If we were to live here always, with no other care than how to feed, clothe, and house ourselves, life would be a very sorry business. It is immeasurably heightened by the solemnity of death.

A man can bear a world's contempt when he has that within which says he's worthy. When he contemns himself, there burns the hell.

In my garden I spend my days, in my library I spend my nights. My interests are divided between my geraniums and my books. With the flower I am in the present; with the book I am in the past.

Death, which we are accustomed to consider an evil, really acts for us the friendliest part, and takes away the commonplace of existence.

The world is not so much in need of new thoughts as that when thought grows old and worn with usage it should, like current coin, be called in, and, from the mint of genius, reissued fresh and new.

We bury love; Forgetfulness grows over it like grass: That is a thing to weep for, not the dead.

How deeply seated in the human heart is the liking for gardens and gardening.

The dead keep their secrets, and in a while we shall be as wise as they - and as taciturn.

In my garden, care stops at the gate and gazes at me wistfully through the bars.

A man's real possession is his memory. In nothing else is he rich, in nothing else is he poor.

Seated in my library at night, and looking on the silent faces of my books, I am occasionally visited by a strange sense of the supernatural.

The sea complains upon a thousand shores.

Thoughts must come naturally, like wild-flowers; they cannot be forced in a hot-bed, even although aided by the leaf-mould of your past.

Fame is but an inscription on a grave, and glory the melancholy blazon on a coffin lid.

Men praise poverty, as the African worships Mumbo Jumbo--from terror of the malign power, and a desire to propitiate at.

Pleasure has no logic; it never treads in its own footsteps.

The globe has been circumnavigated, but no man ever yet has; you may survey a kingdom and note the result in maps, but all the savants in the world could not produce a reliable map of the poorest human personality.

And in any case, to the old man, when the world becomes trite, the triteness arises not so much from a cessation as from a transference of interest. What is taken from this world is given to the next. The glory is in the east in the morning, it is in the west in the afternoon, and when it is dark the splendour is irradiating the realm of the under-world. He would only follow.

A single soul is richer than all the worlds.

Yet through all, we know this tangled skein is in the hands of One, Who sees the end from the beginning: He shall unravel all.

A poem round and perfect as a star.

A bottomless pit of violence, a Tower of Babel where all are speakers and no hearers.

In the entire circle of the year there are no days so delightful as those of a fine October.

Trees are your best antiques

Style, after all, rather than thought, is the immortal thing in literature.

To-day is always different from yesterday.

Not on the stage alone, in the world also, a man's real character comes out best in his asides.

There is no ghost so difficult to lay as the ghost of an injury.

If the egotist is weak, his egotism is worthless. If the egotist is strong, acute, full of distinctive character, his egotism is precious, and remains a possession of the race.

I have learned to prize the quiet, lightning deed, not the applauding thunder at its heels that men call fame.

My friend is not perfect-no more than I am-and so we suit each other admirable.

Men and women make their own beauty or their own ugliness. Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton speaks in one of his novels of a man "who was uglier than he had any business to be;" and, if we could but read it, every human being carries his life in his face, and is good-looking or the reverse as that life has been good or evil. On our features the fine chisels of thought and emotion are eternally at work.

In life there is nothing more unexpected and surprising than the arrivals and departures of pleasure. If we find it in one place today, it is vain to seek it there tomorrow. You can not lay a trap for it.

I would rather be remembered by a song than by a victory.

The discovery of a grey hair when you are brushing out your whiskers of a morning—first fallen flake of the coming snows of age—is a disagreeable thing.... So are flying twinges of gout, shortness of breath on the hill-side, the fact that even the moderate use of your friend's wines at dinner upsets you. These things are disagreeable because they tell you that you are no longer young—that you have passed through youth, are now in middle age, and faring onward to the shadows in which, somewhere, a grave is hid.

Every day travels toward death; the last only arrives at it.

If you wish to preserve your secret, wrap it up in frankness.

Nature never quite goes along with us. She is somber at weddings, sunny at funerals, and she frowns on ninety-nine out of a hundred picnics.

In the entire circle of the year there are no days so delightful as those of a fine October, when the trees are bare to the mild heavens, and the red leaves bestrew the road, and you can feel the breath of winter, morning and evening - no days so calm, so tenderly solemn, and with such a reverent meekness in the air.

There is nothing good in this world which time does not improve.