Top 109 Quotes & Sayings by Alexander Smith

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.

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

If you do your fair day's work, you are certain to get your fair day's wage - in praise or pudding, whichever happens to suit your taste.

A man doesn't plant a tree for himself. He plants it for posterity.

If you wish to make a man look noble, your best course is to kill him. What superiority he may have inherited from his race, what superiority nature may have personally gifted him with, comes out in death.

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

Every man's road in life is marked by the graves of his personal liking.

The sea complains upon a thousand shores.

Trifles make up the happiness or the misery of human life.

Christmas is the day that holds all time together.

Books are a finer world within the world.

Trees are your best antiques.

We are never happy; we can only remember that we were so once.

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

I go into my library and all history unrolls before me.

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

A great man is the man who does something for the first time.

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.

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

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

Everything is sweetened by risk.

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

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.

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

To sit for one's portrait is like being present at one's own creation.

Love is but the discovery of ourselves in others, and the delight in the recognition.

To be occasionally quoted is the only fame I care for.

A man gazing on the stars is proverbially at the mercy of the puddles in the road.

The man who in this world can keep the whiteness of his soul is not likely to lose it in any other.

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

The spot of ground on which a man has stood is forever interesting to him.

Fine phrases I value more than bank-notes. I have ear for no other harmony than the harmony of words. To be occasionally quoted is the only fame I care for.

It is the sternest philosophy, but on the whole the truest, that, in the wide arena of the world, failure and success are not accidents, as we so frequently suppose, but the strictest justice.

To-day is always different from yesterday.

How beautiful the yesterday that stood Over me like a rainbow! I am alone, The past is past. I see the future stretch All dark and barren as a rainy sea.

Trees are your best antiques

It is not of so much consequence what you say, as how you say it. Memorable sentences are memorable on account of some single irradiating word.

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

An old novel has a history of its own.

Looking forward into an empty year strikes one with a certain awe, because one finds therein no recognition. The years behind have a friendly aspect, and they are warmed by the fires we have kindled, and all their echoes are the echoes of our own voices.

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

A man does not plant a tree for himself; he plants it for posterity.

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.

There is a slow-growing beauty which only comes to perfection in old age.... I have seen sweeter smiles on a lip of seventy than I ever saw on a lip of seventeen. There is the beauty of youth, and there is also the beauty of holiness—a beauty much more seldom met; and more frequently found in the arm-chair by the fire, with grandchildren around its knee, than in the ball-room or the promenade.

A man gazing at the stars is proverbially at the mercy of the puddles in the road.

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

Happiness never lays its finger on its pulse. If we attempt to steal a glimpse of its features it disappears.

Every man's road in life is marked by the grave of his personal likings.

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

There is a certain even-handed justice in Time; and for what he takes away he gives us something in return. He robs us of elasticity of limb and spirit, and in its place he brings tranquility and repose—the mild autumnal weather of the soul.

A thought may be very commendable as a thought, but I value it chiefly as a window through which I can obtain insight on the thinker.

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.

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

Pride's chickens have bonny feathers, but they are an expensive brood to rear. They eat up everything, and are always lean when brought to market.

If a man is worth knowing at all, he is worth knowing well.

God has thickly strewn infinity with grandeur.

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.

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.

It is a characteristic of pleasure that we can never recognize it to be pleasure till after it is gone.

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.