Logan Pearsall Smith
What humbugs we are, who pretend to live for beauty, and never see the dawn!Collection: Inspirational
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.Collection: Friendship
All reformers, however strict their social conscience, live in houses just as big as they can pay for.Collection: Hypocrite
An improper mind is a perpetual feast.Collection: Mind
If you are losing your leisure, look out! You are losing your soul.Collection: Time
Give me a bed and a book and I am happy.Collection: Happiness
It's an odd thing about this universe that, though we all disagree with each other, we are all of us always in the right.Collection: Equality
But why wasn't I born, alas, in an age of Adjectives; why can one no longer write of silver-shedding Tears and moon-tailed Peacocks, of eloquent Death, of the Negro and star-enameled Night?Collection: Death
This nice and subtle happiness of reading, this joy not chilled by age, this polite and unpunished vice, this selfish, serene life-long intoxication.Collection: Selfish
Only those who get into scrapes with their eyes open can find the safe way out.Collection: Eye
An echo of music, a face in the street, the wafer of the new moon, a wanton thought - only in the iridescence of things the vagabond soul is happy.Collection: Moon
There are few sorrows in which a good income is of no avail.Collection: Sorrow
People have a right to be shocked; the mention of unmentionable things is a kind of participation in them.Collection: People
How awful to reflect that what people say of us is true!Collection: People
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?Collection: Nature
A best-seller is the gilded tomb of a mediocre talentCollection: Talent
All our lives we are putting pennies — our most golden pennies — into penny-in-the-slot machines that are almost always empty.Collection: Machines
For souls in growth, great quarrels are great emancipations.Collection: Soul
The word snob belongs to the sour-grape vocabulary.Collection: Vocabulary
Growing old is not a gradual decline, but a series of drops, full of sorrow, from one ledge to another below it.Collection: Sorrow
How often my soul visits the National Gallery, and how seldomCollection: Art
The world is not unkind, and reprobates are worse than their reputations.Collection: World
When elderly invalids meet with fellow-victims of their own ailments, then at last real conversation begins, and life is delicious.Collection: Real
A friend who loved perfection would be the perfect friend, did not that love shut his door on me.Collection: Doors
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.Collection: Wind
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.Collection: Mean
He who goes against the fashion is himself its slaveCollection: Fashion
I find a fascination, like the fascination for the moth of a star, in those who hold aloof and disdain me.Collection: Stars
If they lost the incredible conviction that they can change their wives or husbands, marriage would collapse at once.Collection: Marriage
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.Collection: Views
We should nourish our souls on the dew of Poesy, and manure them as well.Collection: Soul
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.Collection: Vanity
Charming people live up to the very edge of their charm, and behave as outrageously as the world will let them.Collection: People
I might give my life for my friend, but he had better not ask me to do up a parcel.Collection: Friendship
I like to walk down Bond Street, thinking of all the things I don't desire.Collection: Thinking
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.Collection: Dying
We grow with years more fragile in body, but morally stutter, and can throw off the chill of a bad conscience almost at once.Collection: Years
So, I never lose a sense of the whimsical and perilous charm of daily life, with its meetings and words and accidents.Collection: Chance
The lusts and greeds of the body scandalize the Soul; but it has to come to heel.Collection: Greed
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.Collection: Life
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.Collection: Funny
Eat with the rich, but go to the play with the poor, who are capable of joy.Collection: Play
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.Collection: Years
Thank heavens, the sun has gone in and I don’t have to go out and enjoy it.Collection: Heaven
Friends such as we desire are dreams and fables, yet we never quite give up the hope of finding them.Collection: Friends
You cannot be both fashionable and first-rateCollection: Fashion
Fine writers should split hairs together, and sit side by side, like friendly apes, to pick the fleas from each others fur.Collection: Hair
There are people whose society I find delicious; but when I sit alone and think of them I shudder.Collection: Thinking
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.Collection: Names