A best-seller is the golden touch of mediocre talent.
—Logan Pearsall Smith
Topics: Books
There is more felicity on the far side of baldness than young men can possibly imagine.
—Logan Pearsall Smith
Topics: Men
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: Preaching, Evangelism
What humbugs we are, who pretend to live for Beauty, and never see the Dawn.
—Logan Pearsall Smith
Topics: Beauty
Only among people who think no evil can Evil monstrously flourish.
—Logan Pearsall Smith
Topics: Evil
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: Aging, Just for Fun, Youth
All reformers, however strict their social conscience, live in houses just as big as they can pay for.
—Logan Pearsall Smith
Topics: Hypocrisy
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: Autobiography, Legacy
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, Affection
The vitality of a new movement in Art must be gauged by the fury it arouses.
—Logan Pearsall Smith
Topics: Artists, Arts, Art
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, Eating, Success, Blessings
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
If you are losing your leisure, look out! You are losing your soul.
—Logan Pearsall Smith
Topics: Rest, Leisure
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
What is more mortifying than to feel that you have missed the plum for want of courage to shake the tree?
—Logan Pearsall Smith
Topics: Courage, Success
He who goes against the fashion is himself its slave.
—Logan Pearsall Smith
Topics: Fashion
You cannot be both fashionable and first-rate.
—Logan Pearsall Smith
Topics: Fashion
The wretchedness of being rich is that you live with rich people. 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: Riches, Wealth
What joy can the years bring half so sweet as the unhappiness they’ve taken away?
—Logan Pearsall Smith
Topics: Joy, Excitement
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
How it infuriates a bigot, when he is forced to drag out his dark convictions!
—Logan Pearsall Smith
Topics: Prejudice
How awful to reflect that what people say of us is true!
—Logan Pearsall Smith
Topics: Gossip
How many of our daydreams would darken into nightmares, were there a danger of their coming true.
—Logan Pearsall Smith
Topics: Perspective, Dreams
One can be bored until boredom becomes a mystical experience.
—Logan Pearsall Smith
Topics: Boredom
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
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
I can’t forgive my friends for dying; I don’t find these vanishing acts of theirs at all amusing.
—Logan Pearsall Smith
Topics: Friends and Friendship, Forgiveness
Thank Heaven, the sun has gone in, and I don’t have to go out and enjoy it.
—Logan Pearsall Smith
Topics: Night
A best seller is the gilded tomb of a mediocre talent
—Logan Pearsall Smith
Topics: Talent
The test of a vocation is the love of the drudgery it involves.
—Logan Pearsall Smith
Topics: Talents, Work, Abilities
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