Logan Pearsall Smith Quotes - Page 4

A best-seller is the gilded tomb of a mediocre talent

For souls in growth, great quarrels are great emancipations.

The word snob belongs to the sour-grape vocabulary.

The mere process of growing old together will make the slightest acquaintance seem a bosom friend.

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

Growing old is not a gradual decline, but a series of drops, full of sorrow, from one ledge to another below it.

How often my soul visits the National Gallery, and how seldom

The world is not unkind, and reprobates are worse than their reputations.

When elderly invalids meet with fellow-victims of their own ailments, then at last real conversation begins, and life is delicious.

People before the public live an imagined life in the thought of others, and flourish or feel faint as their self outside themselves grows bright or dwindles in that mirror.

A friend who loved perfection would be the perfect friend, did not that love shut his door on me.

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 have a right to be shocked; the mention of unmentionable things is a kind of participation in them.

How awful to reflect that what people say of us is true!

When we say we are certain so-and-so can't possibly have done it, what we mean is that we think he very likely did.

If they lost the incredible conviction that they can change their wives or husbands, marriage would collapse at once.

What shall I compare it to, this fantastic thing I call my Mind? To a waste-paper basket, to a sieve choked with sediment, or to a barrel full of floating froth and refuse? No, what it is really most like is a spider's web, insecurely hung on leaves and twigs, quivering in every wind, and sprinkled with dewdrops and dead flies. And at its centre, pondering forever the Problem of Existence, sits motionless the spider-like and uncanny Soul.

I find a fascination, like the fascination for the moth of a star, in those who hold aloof and disdain me.

He who goes against the fashion is himself its slave

I might give my life for my friend, but he had better not ask me to do up a parcel.

The vitality of a new movement in Art must be gauged by the fury it arouses.

It is through the cracks in our brains that ecstasy creeps in.

The emergence of a new term to describe a certain phenomenon, of a new adjective to designate a certain quality, is always of interest, both linguistically and from the point of view of the history of human thought.

We should nourish our souls on the dew of Poesy, and manure them as well.

I like to walk down Bond Street, thinking of all the things I don't desire.