Explore popular quotes and sayings by an American writer Logan Pearsall Smith.
Last updated on November 10, 2024.
Logan Pearsall Smith was an American-born British essayist and critic. Harvard and Oxford educated, he was known for his aphorisms and epigrams, and was an expert on 17th Century divines. His Words and Idioms made him an authority on correct English language usage. He wrote his autobiography, Unforgotten Years, in 1938.
If you want to be thought a liar, always tell the truth.
The test of a vocation is the love of the drudgery it involves.
To suppose as we all suppose, that we could be rich and not behave as the rich behave, is like supposing that we could drink all day and stay sober.
People say that life is the thing, but I prefer reading.
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.
Solvency is entirely a matter of temperament and not of income.
A best-seller is the gilded tomb of a mediocre talent.
Charming people live up to the very edge of their charm, and behave as outrageously as the world lets them.
How it infuriates a bigot, when he is forced to drag out his dark convictions!
The newest books are those that never grow old.
Only among people who think no evil can Evil monstrously flourish.
Happiness is a wine of the rarest vintage, and seems insipid to a vulgar taste.
What's more enchanting than the voices of young people, when you can't hear what they say?
We grow with years more fragile in body, but morally stouter, and can throw off the chill of a bad conscience almost at once.
What joy can the years bring half so sweet as the unhappiness they've taken away?
Don't laugh at a youth for his affectations; he is only trying on one face after another to find a face of his own.
It is through the cracks in our brains that ecstasy creeps in.
Many of our daydreams would darken into nightmares, were there a danger of their coming true!
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.
He who goes against the fashion is himself its slave.
Those who set out to serve both God and Mammon soon discover that there isn't a God.
A slight touch of friendly malice and amusement towards those we love keeps our affections for them from turning flat.
Don't let young people tell you their aspirations; when they drop them they will drop you.
It takes a great man to give sound advice tactfully, but a greater to accept it graciously.
It is the wretchedness of being rich that you have to live with rich people.
Those who set out to serve both God and Mammon soon discover that there is no God.
I can't forgive my friends for dying; I don't find these vanishing acts of theirs at all amusing.
What I like in a good author is not what he says but what he whispers.
We need two kinds of acquaintances, one to complain to, while to the others we boast.
There is more felicity on the far side of baldness than young men can possibly imagine.
The old know what they want; the young are sad and bewildered.
When they come downstairs from their Ivory Towers, idealists are very apt to walk straight into the gutter.
If you are losing your leisure, look out; you may be losing your soul.
Only a generation of readers will span a generation of writers.
The vitality of a new movement in Art must be gauged by the fury it arouses.
Hearts that are delicate and kind and tongues that are neither - these make the finest company in the world.
The denunciation of the young is a necessary part of the hygiene of older people, and greatly assists the circulation of the blood.
The mere process of growing old together will make our slightest acquaintances seem like bosom friends.
Every author, however modest, keeps a most outrageous vanity chained like a madman in the padded cell of his breast.
There are people who, like houses, are beautiful in dilapidation.
Our names are labels, plainly printed on the bottled essence of our past behavior.
Most people sell their souls, and live with a good conscience on the proceeds.
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.
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.
What is more mortifying than to feel that you have missed the plum for want of courage to shake the tree?
Thank Heaven, the sun has gone in, and I don't have to go out and enjoy it.
There are few sorrows, however poignant, in which a good income is of no avail.
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?
There is one thing that matters, to set a chime of words tinkling in the minds of a few fastidious people.
What humbugs we are, who pretend to live for beauty, and never see the dawn!
Don't tell friends their social faults; they will cure the fault and never forgive you.
Whiskey has killed more men than bullets, but most men would rather be full of whiskey than bullets.
Give me a bed and a book and I am happy.
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?
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.
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.
If you are losing your leisure, look out! You are losing your soul.
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.
There are few sorrows in which a good income is of no avail.
The test of enjoyment is the remembrance which it leaves behind.