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
What pursuit is more elegant than that of collecting the ignominies of our nature and transfixing them for show, each on the bright pin of a polished phrase?
—Logan Pearsall Smith
Topics: Legacy, Autobiography
You cannot be both fashionable and first-rate.
—Logan Pearsall Smith
Topics: Fashion
Our names are labels, plainly printed on the bottled essence of our past behavior.
—Logan Pearsall Smith
Topics: Integrity, Names
He who goes against the fashion is himself its slave.
—Logan Pearsall Smith
Topics: Fashion
It takes a great man to give sound advice tactfully, but a greater to accept it graciously.
—Logan Pearsall Smith
Topics: Men, Advice
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
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
Solvency is entirely a matter of temperament, not of income.
—Logan Pearsall Smith
Topics: Wealth, Safety, Security
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
The test of enjoyment is the remembrance which it leaves behind.
—Logan Pearsall Smith
Topics: Happiness, Enjoyment
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
The old know what they want; the young are sad and bewildered.
—Logan Pearsall Smith
Topics: Generations
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
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.
—Logan Pearsall Smith
Topics: Reading, Books
Eat with the rich, but go play with the poor, who are capable of joy.
—Logan Pearsall Smith
Topics: Joy
How many of our daydreams would darken into nightmares, were there a danger of their coming true.
—Logan Pearsall Smith
Topics: Perspective, Dreams
All reformers, however strict their social conscience, live in houses just as big as they can pay for.
—Logan Pearsall Smith
Topics: Hypocrisy
How awful to reflect that what people say of us is true!
—Logan Pearsall Smith
Topics: Gossip
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
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 stay sober.
—Logan Pearsall Smith
Topics: Money
Don’t let young people tell you their aspirations; when they drop them they will drop you.
—Logan Pearsall Smith
Topics: Aspirations, Youth
For souls in growth, great quarrels are great emancipators.
—Logan Pearsall Smith
Topics: Self-Discovery
Happiness is a wine of the rarest vintage, and seems insipid to a vulgar taste.
—Logan Pearsall Smith
Topics: Wine, Happiness
There is more felicity on the far side of baldness than young men can possibly imagine.
—Logan Pearsall Smith
Topics: Men
What’s more enchanting than the voices of young people, when you can’t hear what they say?
—Logan Pearsall Smith
Topics: Children
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: Integrity, Age
Most people sell their souls, and live with a good conscience on the proceeds.
—Logan Pearsall Smith
Topics: Soul
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
Topics: Evangelism, Preaching
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
Robertson Davies Canadian Novelist, Playwright
Henry Adams American Historian
Benjamin Jowett British Theologian
Gore Vidal American Novelist
Walt Whitman American Poet
John Evelyn English Restoration Diarist
Arnold J. Toynbee British Historian
Matthew Arnold English Poet, Critic
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg German Philosopher, Physicist
George Steiner American Culture Critic