Quotes from Logan Pearsall Smith

The vitality of a new movement in Art must be gauged by the fury it arouses.

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

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

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.

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

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

The wretchedness of being rich is that you live with rich people.

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.

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

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.

If it's to be, it's up to me.

It is through the cracks in our brains that ecstasy creeps in.

Self-respecting people do not care to peep at their reflections in unexpected mirrors or to see themselves as others see them.

People say that life is the thing, but I prefer reading.

What humbugs we are, who pretend to live for beauty, and never see the dawn!

When elderly invalids meet with fellow-victims of their own ailments, then at last real conversation begins, and life is delicious.

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

Solvency is entirely a matter of temperament and not of income.

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.

People before the public live an imagined life in the thought of others, and flourish or feel faint as their self outside themselves grows bright or dwindles in that mirror.

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

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?

I might give my life for my friend, but he had better not ask me to do up a parcel.

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