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
Only among people who think no evil can Evil monstrously flourish.
—Logan Pearsall Smith
Topics: Evil
Don’t tell your friends their social faults; they will cure the fault and never forgive you.
—Logan Pearsall Smith
Topics: Friendship, Forgiveness
We need two kinds of acquaintances, one to complain to, while to the others we boast.
—Logan Pearsall Smith
Topics: Friendship
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
Don’t let young people tell you their aspirations; when they drop them they will drop you.
—Logan Pearsall Smith
Topics: Aspirations, Youth
There are people who, like houses, are beautiful in dilapidation.
—Logan Pearsall Smith
Topics: Age
It takes a great man to give sound advice tactfully, but a greater to accept it graciously.
—Logan Pearsall Smith
Topics: Advice, Men
Every author, however modest, keeps a most outrageous vanity chained like a madman in the padded cell of his breast.
—Logan Pearsall Smith
One can be bored until boredom becomes a mystical experience.
—Logan Pearsall Smith
Topics: Boredom
All my life, as down an abyss without a bottom. I have been pouring van loads of information into that vacancy of oblivion I call my mind.
—Logan Pearsall Smith
Topics: Education
When they come downstairs from their Ivory Towers, idealists are very apt to walk straight into the gutter.
—Logan Pearsall Smith
Topics: Ideals, Idealism
I can’t forgive my friends for dying; I don’t find these vanishing acts of theirs at all amusing.
—Logan Pearsall Smith
Topics: Forgiveness, Friends and Friendship
If you want to be thought a liar, always tell the truth.
—Logan Pearsall Smith
Topics: Deception/Lying, Lies
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, Blessings, Eating
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: Success, Goals, Happiness, Money
For souls in growth, great quarrels are great emancipators.
—Logan Pearsall Smith
Topics: Self-Discovery
What’s more enchanting than the voices of young people, when you can’t hear what they say?
—Logan Pearsall Smith
Topics: Children
That we should practice what we preach is generally admitted; but anyone who preaches what he and his hearers practice must incur the gravest moral disapprobation.
—Logan Pearsall Smith
Those who set out to serve both God and Mammon soon discover that there isn’t a God.
—Logan Pearsall Smith
Topics: Money, God
Solvency is entirely a matter of temperament, not of income.
—Logan Pearsall Smith
Topics: Wealth, Security
One’s own vanities and humiliations I find a delicious subject for conversation. Things said of me behind my back I don’t enjoy, and don’t listen to them.
—Logan Pearsall Smith
Topics: Gossip
There are few sorrows, however poignant, in which a good income is of no avail.
—Logan Pearsall Smith
Topics: Money
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
Whiskey has killed more men than bullets, but most men would rather be full of whiskey than bullets. What I like in a good author is not what he says, but what he whispers.
—Logan Pearsall Smith
What humbugs we are, who pretend to live for Beauty, and never see the Dawn.
—Logan Pearsall Smith
Topics: Beauty
A slight touch of friendly malice and amusement towards those we love keeps our affections for them from turning flat.
—Logan Pearsall Smith
Topics: Love
If you are losing your leisure, look out! You are losing your soul.
—Logan Pearsall Smith
Topics: Leisure
A best-seller is the golden touch of mediocre talent.
—Logan Pearsall Smith
Topics: Books
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
Walt Whitman American Poet
Benjamin Jowett British Theologian
Gore Vidal American Novelist
Robertson Davies Canadian Novelist, Playwright
Matthew Arnold English Poet, Critic
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg German Philosopher, Physicist
James Russell Lowell American Poet, Critic
H. L. Mencken American Journalist, Literary Critic
David Sedaris American Humorist, Essayist
Aldous Huxley English Humanist