Logan Pearsall Smith Quotes

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 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.

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

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?

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.

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

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

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

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!

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

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?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

What shall I compare it to, this fantastic thing I call my Mind? To a waste-paper basket, to a sieve choked with sediment, or to a barrel full of floating froth and refuse? No, what it is really most like is a spider's web, insecurely hung on leaves and twigs, quivering in every wind, and sprinkled with dewdrops and dead flies. And at its centre, pondering forever the Problem of Existence, sits motionless the spider-like and uncanny Soul.

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

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

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

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