Logan Pearsall Smith

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

— Logan Pearsall Smith

If you want to be thought a liar, always tell the truth.

— Logan Pearsall Smith

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

— Logan Pearsall Smith

Happiness is a wine of the rarest vintage, and seems insipid to a vulgar taste.

— Logan Pearsall Smith

It takes a great man to give sound advice tactfully, but a greater to accept it graciously.

— Logan Pearsall Smith

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

— Logan Pearsall Smith

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

— Logan Pearsall Smith

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

— Logan Pearsall Smith

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

— Logan Pearsall Smith

The test of a vocation is the love of the drudgery it involves.

— Logan Pearsall Smith

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.

— Logan Pearsall Smith

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

— Logan Pearsall Smith

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.

— Logan Pearsall Smith

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

— Logan Pearsall Smith

There are few sorrows, however poignant, in which a good income is of no avail.

— Logan Pearsall Smith

There are two things to aim at in life: first, to get what you want; and, after that, to enjoy it. Only the wisest of mankind achieve the second.

— Logan Pearsall Smith

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.

— Logan Pearsall Smith

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

— Logan Pearsall Smith

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?

— Logan Pearsall Smith

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

— Logan Pearsall Smith

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

— Logan Pearsall Smith

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

— Logan Pearsall Smith

Thank heavens, the sun has gone in, and I don't have to go out and enjoy it.

— Logan Pearsall Smith

It is certainly curious that among all the millions of books that have been written on every conceivable subject, so few writers have really tried to describe the tissue of their thoughts and the actual taste of consciousness. And yet this is, after all, our most immediate and direct experience, the only experience of whose reality we are absolutely certain.

— Logan Pearsall Smith

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.

— Logan Pearsall Smith

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.

— Logan Pearsall Smith

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.

— Logan Pearsall Smith

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

— Logan Pearsall Smith

That one should practice what one preaches is generally agreed, but anyone who has the indiscretion to preach what both he and his hearers practice must always incur—as Lord Chesterfield has incurred—the gravest moral reprobation.

— Logan Pearsall Smith

What draws us to him so closely is that he combined a disillusioned estimate of human nature sufficient to launch twenty little cynics, with a craving for love and sympathy urgent enough to turn a weaker nature into a benign sentimentalist.

— Logan Pearsall Smith

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?

— Logan Pearsall Smith

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.

— Logan Pearsall Smith

We need two kinds of acquaintances, one to complain to, while to the others we boast.

— Logan Pearsall Smith

If you want to be thought a liar, always tell the truth.

— Logan Pearsall Smith

The vitality of a new movement in Art must be gauged by the fury it arouses.

— Logan Pearsall Smith

What I like in a good author is not what he says but what he whispers.

— Logan Pearsall Smith

We need two kinds of acquaintances, one to complain to, while to the others we boast.

— Logan Pearsall Smith

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

— Logan Pearsall Smith

We need two kinds of acquaintances, one to complain to, while to the others we boast.

— Logan Pearsall Smith