Alexander Smith Quotes

64 Sourced Quotes

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

Alexander Smith
There is nothing good in this world which time does not improve.

Alexander Smith
The world is not so much in need of new thoughts as that when thought grows old and worn with usage it should, like current coin, be called in, and, from the mint of genius, reissued fresh and new.

Alexander Smith
How deeply seated in the human heart is the liking for gardens and gardening.

Alexander Smith
Each time we love,
We turn a nearer and a broader mark
To that keen archer, Sorrow, and he strikes.

Alexander Smith
Looking forward into an empty year strikes one with a certain awe, because one finds therein no recognition. The years behind have a friendly aspect, and they are warmed by the fires we have kindled, and all their echoes are the echoes of our own voices.

Alexander Smith
Give the mood, and the essay, from the first sentence to the last, grows around it as a cocoon grows around the silkworm.

Alexander Smith
If you wish to make a man look noble, your best course is to kill him. What superiority he may have inherited from his race, what superiority nature may have personally gifted him with, comes out in death.

Alexander Smith
A man does not plant a tree for himself; he plants it for posterity.

Alexander Smith
In winter, when the dismal rain
Comes down in slanting lines,
And Wind, that grand old harper, smote
His thunder-harp of pines.

Alexander Smith
Seated in my library at night, and looking on the silent faces of my books, I am occasionally visited by a strange sense of the supernatural.

Alexander Smith
The saddest thing that befalls a soul
Is when it loses faith in God and woman.

Alexander Smith
In the entire circle of the year there are no days so delightful as those of a fine October, when the trees are bare to the mild heavens, and the red leaves bestrew the road, and you can feel the breath of winter, morning and evening - no days so calm, so tenderly solemn, and with such a reverent meekness in the air.

Alexander Smith
There is no ghost so difficult to lay as the ghost of an injury.

Alexander Smith
We are never happy; we can only remember that we were so once.

Alexander Smith
I go into my library, and all history unrolls before me. I breathe the morning air of the world while the scent of Eden's roses yet lingered in it, while it vibrated only to the world's first brood of nightingales, and to the laugh of Eve. I see the pyramids building; I hear the shoutings of the armies of Alexander.

Alexander Smith
Vanity in its idler moments is benevolent, is as willing to give pleasure as to take it, and accepts as sufficient reward for its services a kind word or an approving smile.

Alexander Smith
We bury love; Forgetfulness grows over it like grass: That is a thing to weep for, not the dead.

Alexander Smith
It is not of so much consequence what you say, as how you say it. Memorable sentences are memorable on account of some single irradiating word.

Alexander Smith
If you do your fair day's work, you are certain to get your fair day's wage - in praise or pudding, whichever happens to suit your taste.

Alexander Smith
We twain have met like the ships upon the sea,
Who hold an hour's converse, so short, so sweet;
One little hour! And then, away they speed
On lonely paths, through mist and cloud and foam,
To meet no more.

Alexander Smith
Death is the ugly fact which Nature has to hide, and she hides it well.

Alexander Smith
How beautiful the yesterday that stood
Over me like a rainbow! I am alone,
The past is past. I see the future stretch
All dark and barren as a rainy sea.

Alexander Smith
We hear the wail of the remorseful winds
In their strange penance. And this wretched orb
Knows not the taste of rest; a maniac world,
Homeless and sobbing through the deep she goes.

Alexander Smith
Fame is but an inscription on a grave, and glory the melancholy blazon on a coffin lid.

Alexander Smith
In my garden I spend my days, in my library I spend my nights. My interests are divided between my geraniums and my books. With the flower I am in the present; with the book I am in the past.

Alexander Smith