Pearsall Quotes & Sayings

Lasting love is more a matter of learning to look outward at the world together than looking longingly eye-to-eye. Love Conditionally. Healthy, lasting love is conditional, not unconditional. No one, including you, is love-worthy if she or he does not behave lovingly. Love is something you earn, not something you deserve. Worry more about being love-worthy than about your own self-worth. — Paul Pearsall

There are few sorrows, however poignant, in which a good income is of no avail. — Logan Pearsall Smith

Most of the problems we think we have stem from too much self-focus rather than too little. — Paul Pearsall

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

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

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

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

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

The ladies who try to keep their beauty are the ladies who lose it. — Logan Pearsall Smith

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

If you want to be thought a liar, always tell the truth. — Logan Pearsall Smith

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. — Logan Pearsall Smith

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

I began to fear that constant hoping might cause me to sacrifice today for the illusion of a better tomorrow. - The Last Self-Help Book You'll Ever Need — Paul Pearsall

Work addiction seems to be an addiction we are proud of. We almost seem to brag with mock displeasure that we are "overwhelmed" with busyness, sometimes as an excuse for not really being able to do what we really want to be doing. Work addiction is a symptom not of working your brains out but of your brain working you out. Why are you doing what you're doing for a career and how do you like doing it? Do you like your answer? — Paul Pearsall

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

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. — Logan Pearsall Smith

True joy results when we become aware of our connectedness to everything. — Paul Pearsall

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

It is through the cracks in our brains that ecstasy creeps in. — Logan Pearsall Smith

The wretchedness of being rich is that you live with rich people. 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.
-Logan Pearsall Smith (1865-1946) US-English essayist, editor, anthologist — Logan Pearsall Smith

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

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

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

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

Addiction is not a fact of life but a description about how we are choosing to live. — Paul Pearsall

The test of enjoyment is the remembrance which it leaves behind. — Logan Pearsall Smith

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

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

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. — Logan Pearsall Smith

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

The mind-closing danger of biased beliefs occurs when we don't know we hold them. Sometimes we have to swallow our pride and engage in clear-eyed analysis. — Paul Pearsall

And whenever he's busy trying to be all he can be, he forgets about trying to be all we can be. — Paul Pearsall

A best-seller is the gilded tomb of a mediocre talent — Logan Pearsall Smith

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

What I like in a good author is not what he says, but what he whispers. — Logan Pearsall Smith

The word snob belongs to the sour-grape vocabulary. — Logan Pearsall Smith

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

It is the wretchedness of being rich that you have to live with rich people. — Logan Pearsall Smith

The great art of writing is the art of making people real to themselves with words. — Logan Pearsall Smith

What really drives us to seek help is an equally frightening sensation: that of being alive, yet not really living. — Paul Pearsall

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. — Logan Pearsall Smith

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. — Logan Pearsall Smith

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

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

Sharing laughter is a way of casting delight to the wind so it blows everywhere and to everyone. — Paul Pearsall

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. — Logan Pearsall Smith

The test of a vocation is the love of the drudgery it involves. — Logan Pearsall Smith

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

An improper mind is a perpetual feast. — Logan Pearsall Smith

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. — Logan Pearsall Smith

All mirrors are magical mirrors, and we never see our faces in them. — Logan Pearsall Smith

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

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

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

Don't Read Weight-Loss Books: Eat Them. They're a better source of fiber than information on permanent weight loss. If you eat them, they'll stay with you longer and be generally better for your bowels than the plans they offer. Ditch Your Diet. Research shows that no diet works for long, and constantly trying and failing at dieting is depressing, unhealthy, and ends up making you even fatter. Use the SWELMM system of Stop Worrying, Eat Less, Move More. — Paul Pearsall

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

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

One can be bored until boredom becomes a mystical experience. — Logan Pearsall Smith

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

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. — Logan Pearsall Smith

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? — Logan Pearsall Smith

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

Thank heavens, the sun has gone in and I don't have to go out and enjoy it. — Logan Pearsall Smith

Marriage, families, all relationships are more a process of learning the dance rather than finding the right dancer — Paul Pearsall

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

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

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

There are few sorrows in which a good income is of no avail. — Logan Pearsall Smith

Stop looking for love and start showing it. — Paul Pearsall

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. — Logan Pearsall Smith

The newest books are those that never grow old. — Logan Pearsall Smith

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

Charming people live up to the very edge of their charm, and behave as outrageously as the world lets them. — Logan Pearsall Smith

We come to feel as we behave. — Paul Pearsall

Our most basic instinct is not for survival but for family. Most of us would give our own life for the survival of a family member, yet we lead our daily life too often as if we take our family for granted. — Paul Pearsall

Married women are kept women, and theyare beginning to find it out. — Logan Pearsall Smith

Yes there is a meaning; at least for me, there is one thing that matters - to set a chime of words tinkling in the minds of a few fastidious people. — Logan Pearsall Smith

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

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. — Logan Pearsall Smith

Shut up and listen. Research shows that people who interrupt are three times more likely to die of a heart attack than those who don't and that marital relationships usually fail because of too much communication, not too little. Couples who spend a lot of time being quiet together stay together. — Paul Pearsall

The old know what they want; the young are sad and bewildered. — Logan Pearsall Smith

How often my soul visits the National Gallery, and how seldom — Logan Pearsall Smith

The objective of two lovers is almost always the same; to find meaning in their individual lives and in their life together. — Paul Pearsall

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

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

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

He who goes against the fashion is himself its slave. — Logan Pearsall Smith

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

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? — Logan Pearsall Smith

There are people who, like houses, are beautiful in dilapidation. — Logan Pearsall Smith

Style is a magic wand, and turns everything to gold that it touches. — Logan Pearsall Smith

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

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

You can resent your bald spot or be glad you have a head. — Paul Pearsall

The five principles of aloha, when practiced together, awaken our awareness of our human potential and the sacredness of our life. — Paul Pearsall

All the pop psychologists are misleading people about things like guilt and conscience. Guilt is a noble emotion; the person without it is a monster.16 — Paul Pearsall

It is the mark of an educated man to be able to evaluate a thought without accepting it. ARISTOTLE — Paul Pearsall

Don't Expect What Goes Around to Come Around. Total jerks and evil people often get all the good breaks. Being nice guarantees nothing. Good things happen to bad people. Sometimes, things just don't "balance out" or "work out for the best. — Paul Pearsall

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