Logan Pearsall Smith Quotes

157 Sourced Quotes

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 achieve the second.

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

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
When they come downstairs from their Ivory Towers, Idealists are very apt to walk straight into the gutter.

Logan Pearsall Smith
There is one thing that matters – to set a chime of words tinkling in the minds of a few fastidious people.

Logan Pearsall Smith
The test of a vocation is the love of the drudgery it involves.

Logan Pearsall Smith
People say that life is the thing, but I prefer reading.

Logan Pearsall Smith
Eat with the Rich, but go to the play with the Poor, who are capable of Joy.

Logan Pearsall Smith
The world, as I know from my books, is full of abominable evil; even some of these books have never been returned.

Logan Pearsall Smith
When people come and talk to you of their aspirations, before they leave you'd better count your spoons.

Logan Pearsall Smith
Those who say everything is pleasant and everyone delightful, come to the awful fate of believing what they say.

Logan Pearsall Smith
How hard it is for the Good to go wrong! I seem to find all the pleasant paths of Transgression barred and barricaded against me.

Logan Pearsall Smith
If with an excess of interest you peer into the lives of other people, what you will probably find is that you have to pay their debts.

Logan Pearsall Smith
Goodness isn't enough; but what delicate glaze it gives to people who are good as well as charming!

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

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
All Reformers, however strict their social conscience, live in houses just as big as they can pay for.

Logan Pearsall Smith
Married women are kept women, and they are beginning to find it out.

Logan Pearsall Smith
It is the dread of something happening, something unknown and dreadful, that makes us do anything to keep the flicker of talk from dying out.

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
We live in a world of monkeys; but often monkeys, at a distance, look like men.

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
Only those who get into scrapes with their eyes open can find the safe way out.

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

Logan Pearsall Smith
And the tremendous Enigma which so troubled the soul of King David — the prosperity of the Wicked, and the Righteous as withered grass — this moral paradox does not spoil my appetite in the least.

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

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

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. The complete explanation of any fact is the very last step in human thought; and it is reached, as I have said, if indeed it is ever reached, by the preliminary processes of recognition, designation, and definition. It is with these preliminary processes that our aesthetic criticism is still occupied.

Logan Pearsall Smith
What a joy to find suddenly among strangers a fish from our little swarm of fishes, a bee from our hive!

Logan Pearsall Smith
What humbugs we are, who pretend to live for Beauty, and never see the Dawn.

Logan Pearsall Smith