Logan Pearsall Smith Quotes

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?

There are readers—and I am one of them—whose reading is rather like a series of intoxications. We fall in love with a book; it is our book, we feel, for life; we shall not need another. We cram-throat our friends with it in the cruellest fashion; make it a Gospel, which we preach in a spirit of propaganda and indignation, putting a woe on the world for a neglect of which last week we were equally guilty.

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

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.

How many of our daydreams would darken into nightmares, were there a danger of their coming true!

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.

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

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

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

We grow with years more fragile in body, but morally stouter, and can throw off the chill of a bad conscience almost at once.

Few things are more shocking to those who practice the arts of success than the frank description of those arts.

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.

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.

The disconcerting fact may first be pointed out that if you write badly about good writing, however profound may be your convictions or emphatic your expression of them, your style has a tiresome trick (as a wit once pointed out) of whispering: ‘Don’t listen!’ in your readers’ ears. And it is possible also to suggest that the promulgation of new-fangled aesthetic dogmas in unwieldy sentences may be accounted for—not perhaps unspitefully—by a certain deficiency in aesthetic sensibility; as being due to a lack of that delicate, unreasoned, prompt delight in all the varied and subtle manifestations in which beauty may enchant us.

Experience is always seeking for special literary forms in which its various aspects can find their most adequate expression; and there are many of these aspects which are best rendered in a fragmentary fashion, because they are themselves fragments of experience, gleams and flashes of light, rather than the steady glow of a larger illumination.