Logan Pearsall Smith Quotes

157 Sourced Quotes

If you are up to date today, how dismally out of date you will look tomorrow!

Logan Pearsall Smith
How many of our daydreams would darken into nightmares if there seemed any danger of their coming true!

Logan Pearsall Smith
If you are losing your leisure, look out! You are losing your soul.

Logan Pearsall Smith
I cannot forgive my friends for dying; I do not find these vanishing acts of theirs at all amusing.

Logan Pearsall Smith
Like other Moralists, I like to poke about in that dark cabinet, the human heart, and expose its shady corners.

Logan Pearsall Smith
What pursuit is more elegant than that of collecting the ignominies of our nature and transfixing them for show, each on the bright pin of a polished phrase? Aphorisms are salted and not sugared almonds at Reason's feast.

Logan Pearsall Smith
Style is a magic wand, and turns everything to gold that it touches.

Logan Pearsall Smith
Authors know that the Age of Miracles is not over; how otherwise explain the transfiguration of asses who praise their writings into exquisite arbiters of taste?

Logan Pearsall Smith
All our lives we are putting pennies — our most Golden Pennies — into penny-in-the-slot machines that are empty.

Logan Pearsall Smith
Words aren't always mere words: a few inaudible articulations may fetter two people together for life.

Logan Pearsall Smith
When I see those beautiful and mysterious apparitions we call people, I like to think of their adorations one for another; how they love to gaze in the mirrors of each other's eyes.

Logan Pearsall Smith
One can be bored until boredom becomes a mystical experience.

Logan Pearsall Smith
I love money; just to be in the room with a millionaire makes me less forlorn.

Logan Pearsall Smith
Growing old is not a gradual decline, but a series of drops, full of sorrow, from one ledge to another below it. But when we pick ourselves up we find our bones are, after all, not broken; while level enough and not unpleasing is the new terrace which lies unexplored before us.

Logan Pearsall Smith
After all, a little good taste does no harm, and the fever of Perfection is not catching.

Logan Pearsall Smith
But good style depends, the Persian critics tell us, upon freedom from monetary troubles. Only thus, they say, can one arrive at perfect diction.

Logan Pearsall Smith
Fine writers should split hairs together, and sit side by side, like friendly apes, to pick the fleas from each other's prose.

Logan Pearsall Smith
Most people sell their souls, and live with a good conscience on the proceeds.

Logan Pearsall Smith
There are people I know such horrid things about, that I feel ashamed of myself when I meet them in drawing-rooms, making a good impression.

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

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