Quotes from Alexander Smith

Everything is sweetened by risk.

The sea complains upon a thousand shores.

Your death and my death are mainly of importance to ourselves. The black plumes will be stripped off our hearses within the hour; tears will dry, hurt hearts close again, our graves grow level with the church-yard, and although we are away, the world wags on. It does not miss us; and those who are near us, when the first strangeness of vacancy wears off, will not miss us much either.

In my garden I spend my days, in my library I spend my nights. My interests are divided between my geraniums and my books. With the flower I am in the present; with the book I am in the past.

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

We bury love; Forgetfulness grows over it like grass: That is a thing to weep for, not the dead.

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

In life there is nothing more unexpected and surprising than the arrivals and departures of pleasure. If we find it in one place today, it is vain to seek it there tomorrow. You can not lay a trap for it.

To be occasionally quoted is the only fame I care for.

Memory is a mans real possession....in nothing else is he rich....in nothing else is he poor.

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 the egotist is weak, his egotism is worthless. If the egotist is strong, acute, full of distinctive character, his egotism is precious, and remains a possession of the race.

Trifles make up the happiness or the misery of human life.

Seated in my library at night, and looking on the silent faces of my books, I am occasionally visited by a strange sense of the supernatural.

Sweet April's tears, Dead on the hem of May.

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

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

A man gazing on the stars is proverbially at the mercy of the puddles in the road.

Books are a finer world within our world.

A man's real possession is his memory. In nothing else is he rich, in nothing else is he poor.

Vanity in its idler moments is benevolent, is as willing to give pleasure as to take it, and accepts as sufficient reward for its services a kind word or an approving smile.

Books are a finer world within the world.

The man who in this world can keep the whiteness of his soul is not likely to lose it in any other.

If we were to live here always, with no other care than how to feed, clothe, and house ourselves, life would be a very sorry business. It is immeasurably heightened by the solemnity of death.