Lloyd Logan Pearsall Smith (1865–1946) was an American-born British essayist and critic. He was known for his aphorisms and epigrams and was an expert on 17th-century divines.
Born in Millville, New Jersey, Smith got educated at Haverford College, Harvard University, and Oxford’s Balliol College. He resided in England and on continental Europe after 1888. Becoming a British subject in 1913, he devoted himself to the study of literature and the rules of the English language. His circle of literary friends included Roger Fry, Henry James, and Cyril Connolly. One of his sisters married the philosopher Bertrand Russell, another married the art historian Bernard Berenson.
Smith’s books of aphorisms and essays include Trivia (1902,) More Trivia (1921,) Afterthoughts (1931,) the collection All Trivia (1933,) and Reperusals and Re-collections (1936.) His Words and Idioms (1933) made him an authority on English language usage. He also published collections of short stories, poetry, pamphlets, and biographies. Milton and His Modern Critics (1941) is a defense of John Milton and an attack on T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound for their denigration of Milton.
Smith’s autobiography, Unforgotten Years (1938,) describes his Quaker childhood, his acquaintance with poet Walt Whitman, his accomplishments as a bibliophile, and his experiences as an expatriate.
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Logan Pearsall Smith
The vitality of a new movement in Art must be gauged by the fury it arouses.
—Logan Pearsall Smith
Topics: Art, Artists, Arts
Those who talk on the razor-edge of double-meanings pluck the rarest blooms from the precipice on either side.
—Logan Pearsall Smith
Topics: Discovery
If you want to be thought a liar, always tell the truth.
—Logan Pearsall Smith
Topics: Lying, Lies, Deception/Lying
The lusts and greeds of the body scandalize the Soul; but it has to come to heel.
—Logan Pearsall Smith
Topics: Soul, Greed
Don’t laugh at a youth for his affectations; he’s only trying on one face after another till he finds his own
—Logan Pearsall Smith
Topics: Affectation, Youth
For souls in growth, great quarrels are great emancipators.
—Logan Pearsall Smith
Topics: Self-Discovery
Our names are labels, plainly printed on the bottled essence of our past behavior.
—Logan Pearsall Smith
Topics: Integrity, Names
You cannot be both fashionable and first-rate.
—Logan Pearsall Smith
Topics: Fashion
Don’t let young people tell you their aspirations; when they drop them they will drop you.
—Logan Pearsall Smith
Topics: Youth, Aspirations
One can be bored until boredom becomes a mystical experience.
—Logan Pearsall Smith
Topics: Boredom
Don’t tell your friends their social faults; they will cure the fault and never forgive you.
—Logan Pearsall Smith
Topics: Forgiveness, Friendship, Candor
There are people who, like houses, are beautiful in dilapidation.
—Logan Pearsall Smith
Topics: Age
What joy can the years bring half so sweet as the unhappiness they’ve taken away?
—Logan Pearsall Smith
Topics: Joy, Excitement
Fine writers should split hairs together, and sit side by side, like friendly apes, to pick the fleas from each others fur.
—Logan Pearsall Smith
Denunciation of the young is a necessary part of the hygiene of older people, and greatly assists the circulation of their blood.
—Logan Pearsall Smith
Topics: Youth, Aging, Just for Fun
We need two kinds of acquaintances, one to complain to, while to the others we boast.
—Logan Pearsall Smith
Topics: Friendship
If you are losing your leisure, look out! You are losing your soul.
—Logan Pearsall Smith
Topics: Leisure, Rest
Thank Heaven, the sun has gone in, and I don’t have to go out and enjoy it.
—Logan Pearsall Smith
Topics: Night
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
Topics: Living, Success, Eating, Blessings
What I like in a good author isn’t what he says, but what he whispers.
—Logan Pearsall Smith
Topics: Writing, Authors & Writing
How awful to reflect that what people say of us is true!
—Logan Pearsall Smith
Topics: Gossip
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
Topics: Goals, Money, Success, Happiness
What humbugs we are, who pretend to live for Beauty, and never see the Dawn.
—Logan Pearsall Smith
Topics: Beauty
How it infuriates a bigot, when he is forced to drag out his dark convictions!
—Logan Pearsall Smith
Topics: Prejudice
All reformers, however strict their social conscience, live in houses just as big as they can pay for.
—Logan Pearsall Smith
Topics: Hypocrisy
A best seller is the gilded tomb of a mediocre talent
—Logan Pearsall Smith
Topics: Talent
It takes a great man to give sound advice tactfully, but a greater to accept it graciously.
—Logan Pearsall Smith
Topics: Men, Advice
I hate Spiders—I dislike all kinds of Insects. Their cold intelligence, their empty, stereotyped, unremitted industry repel me. And I am not altogether happy about the future of the Human Race; when I think of the slow refrigeration of the Earth, the Sun’s waning, and the ultimate, inevitable collapse of the Solar System, I have grave misgivings.
—Logan Pearsall Smith
Topics: Humanity
Most people sell their souls, and live with a good conscience on the proceeds.
—Logan Pearsall Smith
Topics: Soul
People say that life is the thing, but I prefer reading.
—Logan Pearsall Smith
Topics: Reading, Books
When they come downstairs from their Ivory Towers, idealists are very apt to walk straight into the gutter.
—Logan Pearsall Smith
Topics: Idealism, Ideals
It’s an odd thing about this universe that, though we all disagree with each other, we are all of us always in the right.
—Logan Pearsall Smith
Topics: Equality
We grow with years more fragile in body, but morally stouter, and can throw off the chill of a bad conscience almost at once.
—Logan Pearsall Smith
Topics: Age, Integrity
The mere process of growing old together will make the slightest acquaintance seem a bosom friend.
—Logan Pearsall Smith
Every author, however modest, keeps a most outrageous vanity chained like a madman in the padded cell of his breast.
—Logan Pearsall Smith
Topics: Vanity
There is one thing that matters—to set a chime of words tinkling in the minds of a few fastidious people.
—Logan Pearsall Smith
Topics: Life and Living
The test of enjoyment is the remembrance which it leaves behind.
—Logan Pearsall Smith
Topics: Enjoyment, Happiness
The old know what they want; the young are sad and bewildered.
—Logan Pearsall Smith
Topics: Generations
He who goes against the fashion is himself its slave.
—Logan Pearsall Smith
Topics: Fashion
What things there are to write, if one could only write them! My mind is full of gleaming thought; gay moods and mysterious, moth-like meditations hover in my imagination, fanning their painted wings. But always the rarest, those streaked with azure and the deepest crimson, flutter away beyond my reach.
—Logan Pearsall Smith
Topics: Writing
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