Alexander Smith Quotes

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.

If you wish to preserve your secret, wrap it up in frankness.

How beautiful the yesterday that stood
Over me like a rainbow! I am alone,
The past is past. I see the future stretch
All dark and barren as a rainy sea.

Every day travels toward death; the last only arrives at it.

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

The truly great rest in the knowledge of their own deserts, nor seek the conformation of the world.

Yet through all, we know this tangled skein is in the hands of One, Who sees the end from the beginning: He shall unravel all.

A man can bear a world's contempt when he has that within which says he's worthy. When he contemns himself, there burns the hell.

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.

An old novel has a history of its own.

There is nothing good in this world which time does not improve.

God has thickly strewn infinity with grandeur.

Books are a finer world within our world.

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

A man gazing on the stars is proverbially at the mercy of the puddles in the road.

I go into my library and all history unrolls before me.

If a man is worth knowing at all, he is worth knowing well.

Every man's road in life is marked by the graves of his personal liking.

There is no ghost so difficult to lay as the ghost of an injury.

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.

Each time we love,We turn a nearer and a broader markTo that keen archer, Sorrow, and he strikes.

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.

To bring the best human qualities to anything like perfection, to fill them with the sweet juices of courtesy and charity, prosperity, or, at all events, a moderate amount of it, is required,
just as sunshine is needed for the ripening of peaches and apricots.

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

A brave soul is a thing which all things serve.

We bury love; Forgetfulness grows over it like grass: That is a thing to weep for, not the dead.

The only thing a man knows is himself.

Fame is but an inscription on a grave, and glory the melancholy blazon on a coffin lid.

A bottomless pit of violence, a Tower of Babel where all are speakers and no hearers.

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.

We twain have met like the ships upon the sea, Who behold an hour's converse, so short, so sweet: One little hour! and then, away they speed On lonely paths, through mist, and cloud, and foam, To meet no more.

Trifles make up the happiness or the misery of human life.

We have two lives;
The soul of man is like the rolling world,
One half in day, the other dipt in night;
The one has music and the flying cloud,
The other, silence and the wakeful stars.

Men praise poverty, as the African worships Mumbo Jumbo
from terror of the malign power, and a desire to propitiate at.

My friend is not perfect-no more than I am-and so we suit each other admirable.

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!

My heart like moon-charmed waters, all unrest ...

In my garden I spend my days; in my library I spend my nights.

The sea complains upon a thousand shores.

Memory is a mans real possession....in nothing else is he rich....in nothing else is he poor.

The saddest thing that befalls a soul is when it loses faith in God and woman.

In winter, when the dismal rain
Comes down in slanting lines,
And Wind, that grand old harper, smote
His thunder-harp of pines.

Most brilliant star upon the crest of Time
Is England. England!

To be occasionally quoted is the only fame I care for.

Failure and success are not accidents, but the strictest justice.

Books are a finer world within the world.

In my garden, care stops at the gate and gazes at me wistfully through the bars.

A great man is the man who does something for the first time.

Death is the ugly fact which Nature has to hide, and she hides it well.

Christmas is the day that holds all time together.

Death takes away the commonplace of life.

The sun was down, And all the west was paved with sullen fire. I cried, Behold! the barren beach of hell At ebb of tide.

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.

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.

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.

One never hugs one's good luck so affectionately as when listening to the relation of some horrible misfortunes which has overtaken others.

The dead keep their secrets, and in a while we shall be as wise as they - and as taciturn.

Nature never quite goes along with us. She is somber at weddings, sunny at funerals, and she frowns on ninety-nine out of a hundred picnics.

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.

Sweet April's tears, Dead on the hem of May.

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.

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

Stirling, like a huge brooch, clasps Highlands and Lowlands together.

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.

How deeply seated in the human heart is the liking for gardens and gardening.

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

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.

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.

Good-humor and, generosity carry day with the popular heart all the world over.