Logan Pearsall Smith Quotes

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

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

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

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. The complete explanation of any fact is the very last step in human thought; and it is reached, as I have said, if indeed it is ever reached, by the preliminary processes of recognition, designation, and definition. It is with these preliminary processes that our aesthetic criticism is still occupied.

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?

If we find, when we read again one of our classics—say Virgil for instance—that we like it better than ever, the experience may suggest an even more pleasing conjecture. Psychologists tell us that fullness of life is the goal of everything that lives, that the impulse towards completeness, towards ripeness and self-realization, is the most compelling of all motives. These discoveries in old books of new beauties and aspects of interest may persuade us, therefore, that we are not only still ourselves, but more ourselves than ever: that our spirit has not only persisted in its being, but has become more lucid in the process.

The notion of making money by popular work, and then retiring to do good work on the proceeds, is the most familiar of all the devil's traps for artists.

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

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.

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

We frequently fall into error and folly, Dr. Johnson tells us, “not because the true principles of action are not known, but because, for a time, they are not remembered.” To compress, therefore, the great and obvious rules of life into brief sentences which are not easily forgotten is, as he said, to confer a real benefit upon us.

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

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

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

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