Alexander Smith Quotes

64 Sourced Quotes

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

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

Alexander Smith
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.

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

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

Alexander Smith
The discovery of a grey hair when you are brushing out your whiskers of a morning—first fallen flake of the coming snows of age—is a disagreeable thing....

Alexander Smith
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.

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

Alexander Smith
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.

Alexander Smith
And in any case, to the old man, when the world becomes trite, the triteness arises not so much from a cessation as from a transference of interest. What is taken from this world is given to the next. The glory is in the east in the morning, it is in the west in the afternoon, and when it is dark the splendour is irradiating the realm of the under-world. He would only follow.

Alexander Smith
Most brilliant star upon the crest of Time
Is England. England!

Alexander Smith
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.

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

Alexander Smith
A tender sadness drops upon my soul, like the soft twilight dropping on the world.

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

Alexander Smith
Men and women make their own beauty or their own ugliness. Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton speaks in one of his novels of a man "who was uglier than he had any business to be;" and, if we could but read it, every human being carries his life in his face, and is good-looking or the reverse as that life has been good or evil. On our features the fine chisels of thought and emotion are eternally at work.

Alexander Smith
The chief object of useful thought, no matter whether the problem is one of language, history, business, or life, is to organize isolated facts into knowledge, and the means of successfully accomplishing this is the use of the scientific method.

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

Alexander Smith
The greatness of an artist or a writer does not depend on what he has in common with other artists and writers, but on what he has peculiar to himself.

Alexander Smith
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.

Alexander Smith
The progress of science would be almost completely arrested, if, every time we succeeded in formulating a seemingly satisfactory statement of truth in regard to some set of phenomena, the exhibition by nature of any behavior which was in conflict with our statement became forthwith "impossible."

Alexander Smith
Not on the stage alone, in the world also, a man's real character comes out best in his asides.

Alexander Smith
To bring the best human qualities to anything like perfection, to fill them with the sweet juices of courtesy and charity, prosperity, or, at all events, a moderate amount of it, is required,--just as sunshine is needed for the ripening of peaches and apricots.

Alexander Smith
Your death and my death are mainly of importance to ourselves. The black plumes will be stripped off our hearses within the hour; tears will dry, hurt hearts close again, our graves grow level with the church-yard, and although we are away, the world wags on. It does not miss us; and those who are near us, when the first strangeness of vacancy wears off, will not miss us much either.

Alexander Smith
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.

Alexander Smith
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.

Alexander Smith
Winter does not work only on a broad scale; he is careful in trifles.

Alexander Smith
The sun was down, And all the west was paved with sullen fire. I cried, Behold! the barren beach of hell At ebb of tide.

Alexander Smith
Yet through all, we know this tangled skein is in the hands of One, Who sees the end from the beginning: He shall unravel all.

Alexander Smith
It is not the gas which "diverges" from our statement or "disobeys" our law, but our statement which is proved by the behavior of the gas to be inaccurate. Our procedure, in such cases, is always more logical than our language, for we never attempt to cure the gas of its error, but always the law itself by suitable modification in its phraseology.

Alexander Smith