Logan Pearsall Smith Quotes

Logan Pearsall Smith offers sharp, slightly sardonic reflections on life, youth and wealth, making you smile at his witty take on human quirks.

31 quotes

1. The denunciation of the young is a necessary part of the hygiene of older people, and greatly assists in the circulation of their blood.

2. Don't laugh at a youth for his affectations; he is only trying on one face after another to find his own.

3. I cannot forgive my friends for dying; I do not find these vanishing acts of theirs at all amusing.

4. What music is more enchanting than the voices of young people, when you can't hear what they say?

5. The test of a vocation is the love of the drudgery it involves.

6. It is the wretchedness of being rich that you have to live with rich people.

7. To suppose, as we all suppose, that we could be rich and not behave as the rich behave, is like supposing that we could drink all day and keep absolutely sober.

8. How many of our daydreams would darken into nightmares if there seemed any danger of their coming true!

9. There are few sorrows, however poignant, in which a good income is of no avail.

10. There are two things to aim at in life: first, to get what you want; and, after that, to enjoy it. Only the wisest of mankind achieve the second.

11. The indefatigable pursuit of an unattainable perfection, even though it consist in nothing more than the pounding of an old piano, is what alone gives a meaning to our life on this unavailing star.

12. People say that life is the thing, but I prefer reading.

13. How can they say my life is not a success? Have I not for more than sixty years got enough to eat and escaped being eaten?

14. All Reformers, however strict their social conscience, live in houses just as big as they can pay for.

15. Most people sell their souls, and live with a good conscience on the proceeds.

16. When they come downstairs from their Ivory Towers, Idealists are very apt to walk straight into the gutter.

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

18. 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.

19. The ladies who try to keep their beauty are the ladies who lose it.

20. Youth is the time for adventures of the body, but age for the triumphs of the mind.

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

22. If you are losing your leisure, look out! You are losing your soul.

23. One's own vanities and humiliations I find a delicious subject for conversation. Things said of me behind my back I don't enjoy, and don't listen to them.

24. The word snob belongs to the sour-grape vocabulary.

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

26. Hearts that are delicate and kind and tongues that are neither - these make the finest company in the world.

27. Whiskey has killed more men than bullets, but most men would rather be full of whiskey than bullets.

28. Style is a magic wand, and turns everything to gold that it touches.

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

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

31. We need new friends; some of us are cannibals who have eaten their old friends up; others must have ever-renewed audiences before whom to re-enact the ideal version of their lives.