If you want to be thought a liar, always tell the truth.
—Logan Pearsall Smith
Topics: Lying, Lies, Deception/Lying
There are few sorrows, however poignant, in which a good income is of no avail.
—Logan Pearsall Smith
Topics: Money
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
If you are losing your leisure, look out! You are losing your soul.
—Logan Pearsall Smith
Topics: Rest, Leisure
Most people sell their souls, and live with a good conscience on the proceeds.
—Logan Pearsall Smith
Topics: Soul
What I like in a good author isn’t what he says, but what he whispers.
—Logan Pearsall Smith
Topics: Writing, Authors & Writing
Solvency is entirely a matter of temperament, not of income.
—Logan Pearsall Smith
Topics: Security, Safety, Wealth
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: Books, Reading
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
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
It takes a great man to give sound advice tactfully, but a greater to accept it graciously.
—Logan Pearsall Smith
Topics: Advice, Men
One can be bored until boredom becomes a mystical experience.
—Logan Pearsall Smith
Topics: Boredom
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: Money, Goals, Happiness, Success
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: Just for Fun, Youth, Aging
How awful to reflect that what people say of us is true!
—Logan Pearsall Smith
Topics: Gossip
When they come downstairs from their Ivory Towers, idealists are very apt to walk straight into the gutter.
—Logan Pearsall Smith
Topics: Idealism, Ideals
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
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 golden touch of mediocre talent.
—Logan Pearsall Smith
Topics: Books
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
What’s more enchanting than the voices of young people, when you can’t hear what they say?
—Logan Pearsall Smith
Topics: Children
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
Our names are labels, plainly printed on the bottled essence of our past behavior.
—Logan Pearsall Smith
Topics: Names, Integrity
For souls in growth, great quarrels are great emancipators.
—Logan Pearsall Smith
Topics: Self-Discovery
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: Youth, Affectation
Don’t let young people tell you their aspirations; when they drop them they will drop you.
—Logan Pearsall Smith
Topics: Youth, Aspirations
The mere process of growing old together will make the slightest acquaintance seem a bosom friend.
—Logan Pearsall Smith
Don’t tell your friends their social faults; they will cure the fault and never forgive you.
—Logan Pearsall Smith
Topics: Friendship, Forgiveness, Candor
People say that life is the thing, but I prefer reading.
—Logan Pearsall Smith
Topics: Reading, Books
The test of a vocation is the love of the drudgery it involves.
—Logan Pearsall Smith
Topics: Talents, Abilities, Work
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
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