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Eternity doth wear upon her face the veil of time. They only see the veil, and thus they know not what they stand so near!
Alexander Smith
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Thoughts must come naturally, like wild-flowers; they cannot be forced in a hot-bed, even although aided by the leaf-mould of your past.
Alexander Smith
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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
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A tender sadness drops upon my soul, like the soft twilight dropping on the world.
Alexander Smith
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Style, after all, rather than thought, is the immortal thing in literature.
Alexander Smith
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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
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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
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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
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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
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To sit for one's portrait is like being present at one's own creation.
Alexander Smith
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There is nothing good in this world which time does not improve.
Alexander Smith
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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
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How deeply seated in the human heart is the liking for gardens and gardening.
Alexander Smith
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Each time we love,
We turn a nearer and a broader mark
To that keen archer, Sorrow, and he strikes.
Alexander Smith
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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
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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
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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
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A man does not plant a tree for himself; he plants it for posterity.
Alexander Smith
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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
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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
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The saddest thing that befalls a soul
Is when it loses faith in God and woman.
Alexander Smith
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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
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There is no ghost so difficult to lay as the ghost of an injury.
Alexander Smith
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We are never happy; we can only remember that we were so once.
Alexander Smith
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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
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Quote of the day
Life is not having been told that the man has just waxed the floor.
Ogden Nash
Alexander Smith
Born:
December 31, 1830
Died:
January 5, 1867
(aged 36)
Bio:
Alexander Smith was a Scottish poet, labelled as one of the Spasmodic School, and essayist.
Known for:
Dreamthorp
City poems
D & D Poetry
Most used words:
grows
man
days
books
love
library
soul
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