Logan Pearsall Smith Quotes

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

But why wasn't I born, alas, in an age of Adjectives; why can one no longer write of silver-shedding Tears and moon-tailed Peacocks, of eloquent Death, of the Negro and star-enameled Night?

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

If it's to be, it's up to me.

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

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

The mere process of growing old together will make the slightest acquaintance seem a bosom friend.

It is the dread of something happening, something unknown and dreadful, that makes us do anything to keep the flicker of talk from dying out.

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

The word snob belongs to the sour-grape vocabulary.

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

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

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

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

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

What pursuit is more elegant than that of collecting the ignominies of our nature and transfixing them for show, each on the bright pin of a polished phrase?

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

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

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

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

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

I am one of the unpraised, unrewarded millions without whom Statistics would be a bankrupt science. It is we who are born, who marry, who die, in constant ratios.

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

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

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

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

An improper mind is a perpetual feast.

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

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

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

To become young again would seem to me an appalling prospect. Youth is a kind of delirium, which can be cured, if it is ever cured at all, by years of painful treatment.

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

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?

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

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

People before the public live an imagined life in the thought of others, and flourish or feel faint as their self outside themselves grows bright or dwindles in that mirror.

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

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

We grow with years more fragile in body, but morally stutter, and can throw off the chill of a bad conscience almost 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 things there are to write, if one could only write them! My mind is full of gleaming thought; gay moods and mysterious, moth-like meditations hover in my imagination, fanning their painted wings. But always the rarest, those streaked with azure and the deepest crimson, flutter away beyond my reach.

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

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

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

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

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

He who goes against the fashion is himself its slave

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.