Top 121 Quotes & Sayings by Logan Pearsall Smith - Page 2

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

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

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

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.

Married women are kept women, and theyare beginning to find it out.

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

One can be bored until boredom becomes a mystical experience.

But man is above all a social and political animal; his relations with his fellow human beings form his most absorbing and important interest.

You cannot be both fashionable and first-rate

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

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

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

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

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

An improper mind is a perpetual feast.

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

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.

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?

Friends such as we desire are dreams and fables, yet we never quite give up the hope of finding them.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

The word snob belongs to the sour-grape vocabulary.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

For souls in growth, great quarrels are great emancipations.

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

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

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.

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

A friend who loved perfection would be the perfect friend, did not that love shut his door on me.

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

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.

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

He who goes against the fashion is himself its slave

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

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