Quotes from Logan Pearsall Smith

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

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

An improper mind is a perpetual feast.

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

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

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

Marriage resembles a pair of shears, so jointed that they cannot be separated often moving in opposite directions, yet always punishing anyone who comes between them.

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

That we should practice what we preach is generally admitted; but anyone who preaches what he and his hearers practice must incur the gravest moral disapprobation.

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

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

The lusts and greeds of the body scandalize the Soul but it has to come to heel.

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

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

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

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

To fear death, my friends, is only to think ourselves wise, without being wise for it is to think that we know what we do not know. For anything that men can tell, death may be the greatest good that can happen to them but they fear it as if they knew quite well that it was the greatest of evils. And what is this but that shameful ignorance of thinking that we know what we do not know

Uncultivated minds are not full of wild flowers, like uncultivated fields. Villainous weeds grow in them, and they are full of toads.

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

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

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?

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

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

Then I thought of reading—the nice and subtle happiness of reading. This was enough, this joy not dulled by Age, this polite and unpunishable vice, this selfish, serene, life-long intoxication.