Pearsall Smith Quotes & Sayings

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. — Logan Pearsall Smith

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

How awful to reflect that what people say of us is true! — Logan Pearsall Smith

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

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. — 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What's more enchanting than the voices of young people, when you can't hear what they say? — Logan Pearsall Smith

The indefatigable pursuit of an unattainable perfection, even though it consists in nothing more than in the pounding of an old piano, is what alone gives a meaning to our life on this unavailing star. — Logan Pearsall Smith

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

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. — Logan Pearsall Smith

Give me a bed and a book and I am happy. — Logan Pearsall Smith

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

Only among people who think no evil can Evil monstrously flourish. — Logan Pearsall Smith

We dressed ourselves up as Gauguin pictures and careered round Crosby Hall. Mrs. Whitehead was scandalized. She said that Vanessa and I were practically naked. My mother's ghost was invoked once more ... to deplore the fact that I had taken a house in Brunswick Square and had asked young men to share it ... Stories began to circulate about parties at which we all undressed in public. Logan Pearsall Smith told Ethel Sands that he knew for a fact that Maynard had copulated with Vanessa on a sofa in the middle of the drawing room. It was a heartless, immoral, cynical society it was said; we were abandoned women and our friends were the most worthless of young men. — Virginia Woolf

For souls in growth, great quarrels are great emancipations. — Logan Pearsall Smith

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. — Logan Pearsall Smith

Hearts that are delicate and kind and tongues that are neither - these make the finest company in the world — Logan Pearsall Smith

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

Solvency is entirely a matter of temperament and not of income. — Logan Pearsall Smith

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 has achieved the second.
— Logan Pearsall Smith

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

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? — Logan Pearsall Smith

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

It takes a great man to give sound advice tactfully, but a greater to accept it graciously. — Logan Pearsall Smith

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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