Logan Pearsall Smith Quotes - Page 3

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.

It is the dread of something happening, something unknown and dreadful, that makes us do anything to keep the flicker of talk from dying out.

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

So, I never lose a sense of the whimsical and perilous charm of daily life, with its meetings and words and accidents.

Every author, however modest, keeps a most outrageous vanity chained like a madman in the padded cell of his breast.

The indefatigable pursuit of an unattainable perfection -even though nothing more than the pounding of an old piano -is what alone gives a 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.

I am one of the unpraised, unrewarded millions without whom Statistics would be a bankrupt science. It is we who are born, who marry, who die, in constant ratios.

Eat with the rich, but go to the play with the poor, who are capable of joy.

To become young again would seem to me an appalling prospect. Youth is a kind of delirium, which can be cured, if it is ever cured at all, by years of painful treatment.

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

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

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

Friends such as we desire are dreams and fables, yet we never quite give up the hope of finding them.

You cannot be both fashionable and first-rate

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

The old know what they want; the young are sad and bewildered.

There are people whose society I find delicious; but when I sit alone and think of them I shudder.

The truth is that the phenomena of artistic production are still so obscure, so baffling, we are still so far from an accurate scientific and psychological knowledge of their genesis or meaning, that we are forced to accept them as empirical facts; and empirical and non-explanatory names are the names that suit them best.

Money and sex are forces too unruly for our reason; they can only be controlled by taboos with which we tamper at our peril.

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.

Happiness is a wine of the rarest vintage, and seems insipid to a vulgar taste.

It is a matter of life and death for married people to interrupt each others stories; for it they did not, they would burst.

Only among people who think no evil can Evil monstrously flourish.

But man is above all a social and political animal; his relations with his fellow human beings form his most absorbing and important interest.