Logan Pearsall Smith Quotes
This nice and subtle happiness of reading, this joy not chilled by age, this polite and unpunished vice, this selfish, serene life-long intoxication.
The great art of writing is the art of making people real to themselves with words.
The indefatigable pursuit of an unattainable perfection -even though nothing more than the pounding of an old piano -is what alone gives a meaning to our life on this unavailing star.
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.
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?
The lusts and greeds of the body scandalize the Soul; but it has to come to heel.
All our lives we are putting pennies — our most golden pennies — into penny-in-the-slot machines that are almost always empty.
Growing old is not a gradual decline, but a series of drops, full of sorrow, from one ledge to another below it.
If we shake hands with icy fingers, it is because we have burnt them so horribly before.
Self-respecting people do not care to peep at their reflections in unexpected mirrors, or to see themselves as others see them.
Friends such as we desire are dreams and fables, yet we never quite give up the hope of finding them.
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.
Uncultivated minds are not full of wild flowers, like uncultivated fields. Villainous weeds grow in them and they are the haunt of toads.
Youth is the time for adventures of the body, but age for the triumphs of the mind.
Hearts that are delicate and kind and tongues that are neither - these make the finest company in the world.
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.
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.
Only those who get into scrapes with their eyes open can find the safe way out.
There are people whose society I find delicious; but when I sit alone and think of them I shudder.
It is a matter of life and death for married people to interrupt each others stories; for it they did not, they would burst.
But man is above all a social and political animal; his relations with his fellow human beings form his most absorbing and important interest.
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.
I find a fascination, like the fascination for the moth of a star, in those who hold aloof and disdain me.
People have a right to be shocked; the mention of unmentionable things is a kind of participation in them.
A friend who loved perfection would be the perfect friend, did not that love shut his door on me.
When we say we are certain so-and-so can't possibly have done it, what we mean is that we think he very likely did.
How many of our daydreams would darken into nightmaresif there seemed any danger of their coming true!
