Quotes from Logan Pearsall Smith

The notion of making money by popular work, and then retiring to do good work, is the most familiar of all the devil's traps for artists.

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

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

It takes a great man to give sound advice tactfully, but a greater to accept it graciously.

You cannot be both fashionable and first-rate.

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

The mere process of growing old together will make the slightest acquaintance seem a bosom friend.

The denunciation of the young is a necessary part of the hygiene of older people, and greatly assists the circulation of their blood.

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

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

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

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

What is more mortifying than to feel you've missed the Plum for want of courage to shake the Tree?

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

For souls in growth, great quarrels are great emancipators.

The denunciation of the young is a necessary part of the hygiene of older people, and greatly assists the circulation of the blood.

What things there are to write, if one could only write them! My mind is full of gleaming thought; gay moods and mysterious, moth-like meditations hover in my imagination, fanning their painted wings. But always the rarest, those streaked with azure and the deepest crimson, flutter away beyond my reach.