Alexander Smith - Dreamthorp

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

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

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

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

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

Alexander Smith
The globe has been circumnavigated, but no man ever yet has; you may survey a kingdom and note the result in maps, but all the savants in the world could not produce a reliable map of the poorest human personality.

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

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

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
The man who in this world can keep the whiteness of his soul is not likely to lose it in any other.

Alexander Smith