Quotes from Logan Pearsall Smith

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

Don't tell your friends their social faults; they will cure the fault and never forgive you.

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 an ideal version of their lives.

An improper mind is a perpetual feast.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Don't laugh at a youth for his affectations; he's only trying on one face after another till he finds his own.

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

Married women are kept women and they are beginning to find it out.

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

There is more felicity on the far side of baldness than young men can possibly imagine.

Many of our daydreams would darken into nightmares, were there a danger of their coming true!

All Reformers, however strict their social conscience, live in houses just as big as they can pay for.

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

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

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

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

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

If you are losing your leisure, look out, you may be losing your soul.

There is one thing that matters, to set a chime of words tinkling in the minds of a few fastidious people.