Alexander Smith Quotes - Page 2

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

In my garden, care stops at the gate and gazes at me wistfully through the bars.

Fame is but an inscription on a grave, and glory the melancholy blazon on a coffin lid.

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

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.

There is nothing good in this world which time does not improve.

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.

God has thickly strewn infinity with grandeur.

Happiness never lays its finger on its pulse. If we attempt to steal a glimpse of its features it disappears.

An old novel has a history of its own.

The pleased sea on a white-breasted shore-- A shore that wears on her alluring brows Rare shells, far brought, the love-gifts of the sea, That blushed a tell-tale.

To-day is always different from yesterday.

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.

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

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

The globe has been circumnavigated, but no man ever yet has; you may survey a kingdom and note the result in maps, but all the savants in the world could not produce a reliable map of the poorest human personality.

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.

Pride's chickens have bonny feathers, but they are an expensive brood to rear. They eat up everything, and are always lean when brought to market.

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

Style, after all, rather than thought, is the immortal thing in literature.

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

The great man is the man who does a thing for the first time.

The greatness of an artist or a writer does not depend on what he has in common with other artists and writers, but on what he has peculiar to himself.

If you do your fair day's work, you are certain to get your fair day's wage - in praise or pudding, whichever happens to suit your taste.

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.