Alexander Smith Quotes

In life there is nothing more unexpected and surprising than the arrivals and departures of pleasure. If we find it in one place to-day, it is vain to seek it there to-morrow. You can not lay a trap for it.

Time has fallen asleep in the afternoon sunshine.

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

The saddest thing that befalls a soul
Is when it loses faith in God and woman.

Everything is sweetened by risk.

Some books are drenchèd sands
On which a great soul’s wealth lies all in heaps,
Like a wrecked argosy.

We twain have met like the ships upon the sea,
Who hold an hour’s converse, so short, so sweet;
One little hour! And then, away they speed
On lonely paths, through mist and cloud and foam,
To meet no more.

Each time we love,
We turn a nearer and a broader mark
To that keen archer, Sorrow, and he strikes.

Like a pale martyr in his shirt of fire.

The soul of man is like the rolling world,
One half in day, the other dipt in night;
The one has music and the flying cloud,
The other, silence and the wakeful stars.

We hear the wail of the remorseful winds
In their strange penance. And this wretched orb
Knows not the taste of rest; a maniac world,
Homeless and sobbing through the deep she goes.

In winter, when the dismal rain Comes down in slanting lines,
And Wind, that grand old harper, smote His thunder-harp of pines.

A poem round and perfect as a star.

The man who in this world can keep the whiteness of his soul is not likely to lose it in any other.