Logan Pearsall Smith Quotes

157 Sourced Quotes

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

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

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

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

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

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
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
Those who set out to serve both God and Mammon soon discover that there isn't a God.

Logan Pearsall Smith
If we shake hands with icy fingers, it is because we've burnt them so hatefully before.

Logan Pearsall Smith
The World is not unkind, and reprobates are far worse than their reputations.

Logan Pearsall Smith
To suppose, as we all suppose, that we could be rich and not behave as the rich behave, is like supposing that we could drink all day and keep absolutely sober.

Logan Pearsall Smith
But we are forced like the insects, and can't help it, to undergo all the metamorphoses preordained for our species.

Logan Pearsall Smith
The mere process of growing old together will make the slightest acquaintance seem a bosom friend.

Logan Pearsall Smith
It is the wretchedness of being rich that you have to live with rich people.

Logan Pearsall Smith
If they lost the incredible conviction that they can change their wives or their husbands, marriage would collapse at once.

Logan Pearsall Smith
The vitality of a new movement in Art or Letters can be accurately gauged by the fury it arouses.

Logan Pearsall Smith
The most heart-breaking of all people are those who bow with us before our Gods, and then skip off to the shrines of the false ones.

Logan Pearsall Smith
I woke this morning... into the well-known, often-discussed, but, to my mind, as yet unexplained Universe.

Logan Pearsall Smith
I know too much; I have stuffed too many of the facts of History and Science into my intellectuals. My eyes have grown dim over books; believing in geological periods, cave dwellers, Chinese Dynasties, and the fixed stars has prematurely aged me.

Logan Pearsall Smith
To become young again would seem to me an appalling prospect. Youth is a kind of delirium, which can be cured, if it is ever cured at all, by years of painful treatment.

Logan Pearsall Smith
What shall I compare it to, this fantastic thing I call my Mind? To a waste-paper basket, to a sieve choked with sediment, or to a barrel full of floating froth and refuse? No, what it is really most like is a spider's web, insecurely hung on leaves and twigs, quivering in every wind, and sprinkled with dewdrops and dead flies. And at its centre, pondering forever the Problem of Existence, sits motionless the spider-like and uncanny Soul.

Logan Pearsall Smith
I think of Space, and the unimportance in its unmeasured vastness, of our toy solar system; I lose myself in speculations of the lapse of Time, reflecting how at the best our human life on this minute and perishing planet is as brief as a dream.

Logan Pearsall Smith
So gazing up on hot summer nights at the London stars, I cool my thoughts with a vision of the giddy, infinite, meaningless waste of Creation, the blazing Suns, the Planets and frozen Moons, all crashing blindly forever across the void of space.

Logan Pearsall Smith
"But what are they really? What do they say they are?" the young lady asked me. We were looking up at the Stars.

Logan Pearsall Smith