Logan Pearsall Smith Quotes

The emergence of a new term to describe a certain phenomenon, of a new adjective to designate a certain quality, is always of interest, both linguistically and from the point of view of the history of human thought.

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

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

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

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

One can be bored until boredom becomes a mystical experience.

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

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

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

You cannot be both fashionable and first-rate

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

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

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

If you are losing your leisure, look out! You are losing your soul.

We need new friends; some of us are cannibals who have eaten their old friends up; others must have ever-renewed audiences before whom to re-enact the ideal version of their lives.

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

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

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

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

One's own vanities and humiliations I find a delicious subject for conversation. Things said of me behind my back I don't enjoy, and don't listen to them.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

For souls in growth, great quarrels are great emancipations.

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

The indefatigable pursuit of an unattainable perfection -even though nothing more than the pounding of an old piano -is what alone gives a meaning to our life on this unavailing star.

People say that life is the thing, but I prefer reading.

When we say we are certain so-and-so can't possibly have done it, what we mean is that we think he very likely did.

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

There are two things to aim at in life: first, to get what you want; and after that, to enjoy it. Only the wisest of mankind achieve the second.

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.

The truth is that the phenomena of artistic production are still so obscure, so baffling, we are still so far from an accurate scientific and psychological knowledge of their genesis or meaning, that we are forced to accept them as empirical facts; and empirical and non-explanatory names are the names that suit them best.

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

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

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

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

Those who set out to serve both God and Mammon soon discover that there isn't a God.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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