Quotes from Alexander Smith

If you wish to make a man look noble, your best course is to kill him. What superiority he may have inherited from his race, what superiority nature may have personally gifted him with, comes out in death.

If a man is worth knowing at all, he is worth knowing well.

The spot of ground on which a man has stood is forever interesting to him.

Not on the stage alone, in the world also, a man's real character comes out best in his asides.

The only thing a man knows is himself.

A man can bear a world's contempt when he has that within which says he's worthy. When he contemns himself, there burns the hell.

Nature never quite goes along with us. She is somber at weddings, sunny at funerals, and she frowns on ninety-nine out of a hundred picnics.

It is the sternest philosophy, but on the whole the truest, that, in the wide arena of the world, failure and success are not accidents, as we so frequently suppose, but the strictest justice.

The saddest thing that befalls a soul is when it loses faith in God and woman.

God has thickly strewn infinity with grandeur.

We are never happy; we can only remember that we were so once.

I go into my library and all history unrolls before me.

It was his nature to blossom into song, as it is a tree's to leaf itself in April.

O kiss me into faintness sweet and dim!

Fine phrases I value more than bank-notes. I have ear for no other harmony than the harmony of words. To be occasionally quoted is the only fame I care for.

How deeply seated in the human heart is the liking for gardens and gardening.

Death is the ugly fact which Nature has to hide, and she hides it well.

Love is but the discovery of ourselves in others, and the delight in the recognition.

There is a certain even-handed justice in Time; and for what he takes away he gives us something in return. He robs us of elasticity of limb and spirit, and in its place he brings tranquility and repose—the mild autumnal weather of the soul.

Trees are your best antiques.

There is no ghost so difficult to lay as the ghost of an injury.

How beautiful the yesterday that stood Over me like a rainbow! I am alone, The past is past. I see the future stretch All dark and barren as a rainy sea.

Christmas is the day that holds all time together.

Every man's road in life is marked by the grave of his personal likings.