Logan Pearsall Smith Quotes

Then I though of reading — the nice and subtle happiness of reading ... this joy not dulled by age, this polite and unpunishable vice, this selfish, serene, lifelong intoxication.

The enormous and half-educated publics of present-day England and America… acclaim as masterpieces books that are soon forgotten, while ignoring all that is exquisite and rare.

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

Then I thought of reading — the nice and subtle happiness of reading. This was enough, this joy not dulled by Age, this polite and unpunishable vice, this selfish, serene, life-long intoxication.

The disconnected impressions which we derive from life form a kind of knowledge ‘in growth,’ as Bacon called it; an over-early and peremptory attempt to digest this knowledge into a system tends, as he suggests, to falsify and distort it.

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

Time spent in labouring to perfect one’s style, or to make of it an instrument for the production of imaginative effects, is, Mr. Read tells us, just so much time wasted. Indeed Mr. Middleton Murry says it is worse than this, for nothing could be more dangerous than the notion that the more poetic is prose, the finer it is; this is a heresy that cannot be too much deplored and combated. ‘The terrible attraction of words, the impulse to use them for anything more than exact symbols of the things they stand for, is another danger; any sacrifice of sense to euphony being, these critics tell us, the beginning of decadence: ‘it is a step on the downward path.’ The histories and associations of words, are, Mr. Read says, entirely irrelevant to prose-style, their face-value in current usage being their only value. The young writer is also warned against rhythmical effects and the use of images, and is told that any conscious care for such devices, any playing, like Stevenson, of the sedulous ape to the masters of this technique, must be carefully eschewed.

One late winter afternoon in Oxford Street, amid the noise of vehicles and voices that filled that dusky thoroughfare, as I was borne onward with the crowd past the great electric-lighted shops, a holy Indifference filled my thoughts. Illusion had faded from me; I was not touched by any desire for the goods displayed in those golden windows, nor had I the smallest share in the appetites and fears of all those moving and anxious faces. And as I listened with Asiatic detachment to the London traffic, its sound changed into something ancient and dissonant and sad — into the turbid flow of that stream of Craving which sweeps men onward through the meaningless cycles of Existence, blind and enslaved forever. But I had reached the farther shore, the Harbour of Deliverance, the Holy City; the Great Peace beyond all this turmoil and fret compassed me around. Om Mani padme hum — I murmured the sacred syllables, smiling with the pitying smile of the Enlightened One on his heavenly lotus.
Then, in a shop-window, I saw a neatly fitted suit-case. I liked that suit-case; I desired to possess it. Immediately I was enveloped by the mists of Illusion, chained once more to the Wheel of Existence, whirled onward along Oxford Street in that turbid stream of wrong-belief, and lust, and sorrow, and anger.

What humbugs we are, who pretend to live for Beauty, and never see the Dawn!

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

May it [the opposition to fine writing] be accounted for by the fact that the spirit of Puritanism, having been banished from the province of moral conduct, has found a refuge among the arts?

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

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

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?

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