Logan Pearsall Smith Quotes

You cannot be both fashionable and first-rate

There are people whose society I find delicious; but when I sit alone and think of them I shudder.

Yes there is a meaning; at least for me, there is one thing that matters - to set a chime of words tinkling in the minds of a few fastidious people.

An improper mind is a perpetual feast.

There are few sorrows in which a good income is of no avail.

This nice and subtle happiness of reading, this joy not chilled by age, this polite and unpunished vice, this selfish, serene life-long intoxication.

He who goes against the fashion is himself its slave.

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

So, I never lose a sense of the whimsical and perilous charm of daily life, with its meetings and words and accidents.

We need two kinds of acquaintances, one to complain to, while to the others we boast.

Fine writers should split hairs together, and sit side by side, like friendly apes, to pick the fleas from each others fur.

The world is not unkind, and reprobates are worse than their reputations.

One late winter afternoon in Oxford Street, amid the noise of vehicles and voices that filled that dusky thoroughfare, as I was borne onward with the crowd past the great electric-lighted shops, a holy Indifference filled my thoughts. Illusion had faded from me; I was not touched by any desire for the goods displayed in those golden windows, nor had I the smallest share in the appetites and fears of all those moving and anxious faces. And as I listened with Asiatic detachment to the London traffic, its sound changed into something ancient and dissonant and sad - into the turbid flow of that stream of Craving which sweeps men onward through the meaningless cycles of Existence, blind and enslaved forever. But I had reached the farther shore, the Harbour of Deliverance, the Holy City; the Great Peace beyond all this turmoil and fret compassed me around. Om Mani padme hum - I murmured the sacred syllables, smiling with the pitying smile of the Enlightened One on his heavenly lotus.
Then, in a shop-window, I saw a neatly fitted suit-case. I liked that suit-case; I desired to possess it. Immediately I was enveloped by the mists of Illusion, chained once more to the Wheel of Existence, whirled onward along Oxford Street in that turbid stream of wrong-belief, and lust, and sorrow, and anger.

All our lives we are putting pennies - our most golden pennies - into penny-in-the-slot machines that are almost always empty.

If we shake hands with icy fingers, it is because we have burnt them so horribly before.

Give me a bed and a book and I am happy.

But man is above all a social and political animal; his relations with his fellow human beings form his most absorbing and important interest.

Charming people live up to the very edge of their charm, and behave as outrageously as the world lets them.

The wretchedness of being rich is that you live with rich people. 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 stay sober.
-Logan Pearsall Smith (1865-1946) US-English essayist, editor, anthologist

Every author, however modest, keeps a most outrageous vanity chained like a madman in the padded cell of his breast.

The indefatigable pursuit of an unattainable perfection, even though it consists in nothing more than in the pounding of an old piano, is what alone gives a meaning to our life on this unavailing star.

It is a matter of life and death for married people to interrupt each others stories; for it they did not, they would burst.

People have a right to be shocked; the mention of unmentionable things is a kind of participation in them.

Growing old is not a gradual decline, but a series of drops, full of sorrow, from one ledge to another below it.

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

There are few sorrows, however poignant, in which a good income is of no avail.

Friends such as we desire are dreams and fables, yet we never quite give up the hope of finding them.

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

How can they say my life is not a success? Have I not for more than sixty years got enough to eat and escaped being eaten?

What's more enchanting than the voices of young people, when you can't hear what they say?

Those who talk on the razor-edge of double-meanings pluck the rarest blooms from the precipice on either side.

Money and sex are forces too unruly for our reason; they can only be controlled by taboos which we tamper with at our peril.

How often my soul visits the National Gallery, and how seldom

I am one of the unpraised, unrewarded millions without whom Statistics would be a bankrupt science. It is we who are born, who marry, who die, in constant ratios.

The emergence of a new term to describe a certain phenomenon, of a new adjective to designate a certain quality, is always of interest, both linguistically and from the point of view of the history of human thought.

Hearts that are delicate and kind and tongues that are neither - these make the finest company in the world

A slight touch of friendly malice and amusement towards those we love keeps our affections for them from turning flat.

It's an odd thing about this universe that, though we all disagree with each other, we are all of us always in the right.

How it infuriates a bigot, when he is forced to drag out his dark convictions!

The old know what they want; the young are sad and bewildered.

We grow with years more fragile in body, but morally stouter, and can throw off the chill of a bad conscience almost at once.

An echo of music, a face in the street, the wafer of the new moon, a wanton thought - only in the iridescence of things the vagabond soul is happy.

All mirrors are magical mirrors, and we never see our faces in them.

All my life, as down an abyss without a bottom. I have been pouring van loads of information into that vacancy of oblivion I call my mind.

There are people who, like houses, are beautiful in dilapidation.

Don't let young people tell you their aspirations; when they drop them they will drop you.

I find a fascination, like the fascination for the moth of a star, in those who hold aloof and disdain me.

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

What joy can the years bring half so sweet as the unhappiness they've taken away?

The test of enjoyment is the remembrance which it leaves behind.

Those who set out to serve both God and Mammon soon discover that there is no God.

Happiness is a wine of the rarest vintage, and seems insipid to a vulgar taste.

Thank heavens, the sun has gone in and I don't have to go out and enjoy it.

The ladies who try to keep their beauty are the ladies who lose it.

Our names are labels, plainly printed on the bottled essence of our past behavior.

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 stay sober.

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

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.

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

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

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.

If you want to be thought a liar, always tell the truth.

Don't laugh at a youth for his affectations; he is only trying on one face after another to find his own.

I like to walk down Bond Street, thinking of all the things I don't desire.

A friend who loved perfection would be the perfect friend, did not that love shut his door on me.

We need new friends; some of us are cannibals who have eaten their old friends up; others must have ever-renewed audiences before whom to re-enact the ideal version of their lives.

One's own vanities and humiliations I find a delicious subject for conversation. Things said of me behind my back I don't enjoy, and don't listen to them.

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

Youth is the time for adventures of the body, but age for the triumphs of the mind.

One can be bored until boredom becomes a mystical experience.