Top 80 Alexander Smith Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “God has thickly strewn infinity with grandeur.”

— Alexander Smith

52. “A single soul is richer than all the worlds.”

— Alexander Smith

53. “Men praise poverty, as the African worships Mumbo Jumbo – from terror of the malign power, and a desire to propitiate at.”

— Alexander Smith

54. “A brave soul is a thing which all things serve.”

— Alexander Smith

55. “Thoughts must come naturally, like wild-flowers; they cannot be forced in a hot-bed, even although aided by the leaf-mould of your past.”

— Alexander Smith

56. “Seated in my library at night, and looking on the silent faces of my books, I am occasionally visited by a strange sense of the supernatural.”

— Alexander Smith

57. “The pale child, Eve, leading her mother, Night.”

— Alexander Smith

58. “The discovery of a grey hair when you are brushing out your whiskers of a morning – first fallen flake of the coming snows of age – is a disagreeable thing...”

— Alexander Smith

59. “How deeply seated in the human heart is the liking for gardens and gardening.”

— Alexander Smith

60. “Vanity in its idler moments is benevolent, is as willing to give pleasure as to take it, and accepts as sufficient reward for its services a kind word or an approving smile.”

— Alexander Smith

61. “Good-humor and, generosity carry day with the popular heart all the world over.”

— Alexander Smith

62. “The world is not so much in need of new thoughts as that when thought grows old and worn with usage it should, like current coin, be called in, and, from the mint of genius, reissued fresh and new.”

— Alexander Smith

63. “A thought may be very commendable as a thought, but I value it chiefly as a window through which I can obtain insight on the thinker.”

— Alexander Smith

64. “Nature never quite goes along with us. She is somber at weddings, sunny at funerals, and she frowns on ninety-nine out of a hundred picnics.”

— Alexander Smith

65. “Pride’s chickens have bonny feathers, but they are an expensive brood to rear. They eat up everything, and are always lean when brought to market.”

— Alexander Smith

66. “A man can bear a world’s contempt when he has that within which says he’s worthy. When he contemns himself, there burns the hell.”

— Alexander Smith

67. “The spot of ground on which a man has stood is forever interesting to him.”

— Alexander Smith

68. “The man who in this world can keep the whiteness of his soul is not likely to lose it in any other.”

— Alexander Smith

69. “Memory is a mans real possession... in nothing else is he rich... in nothing else is he poor.”

— Alexander Smith

70. “To bring the best human qualities to anything like perfection, to fill them with the sweet juices of courtesy and charity, prosperity, or, at all events, a moderate amount of it, is required, – just as sunshine is needed for the ripening of peaches and apricots.”

— Alexander Smith

71. “Not on the stage alone, in the world also, a man’s real character comes out best in his asides.”

— Alexander Smith

72. “If you wish to make a man look noble, your best course is to kill him. What superiority he may have inherited from his race, what superiority nature may have personally gifted him with, comes out in death.”

— Alexander Smith

73. “To sit for one’s portrait is like being present at one’s own creation.”

— Alexander Smith

74. “I have learned to prize the quiet, lightning deed, not the applauding thunder at its heels that men call fame.”

— Alexander Smith

75. “Style, after all, rather than thought, is the immortal thing in literature.”

— Alexander Smith

76. “An old novel has a history of its own.”

— Alexander Smith

77. “It is a characteristic of pleasure that we can never recognize it to be pleasure till after it is gone.”

— Alexander Smith

78. “Trifles make up the happiness or the misery of mortal life.”

— Alexander Smith

79. “To have to die is a distinction of which no man is proud.”

— Alexander Smith

80. “One never hugs one’s good luck so affectionately as when listening to the relation of some horrible misfortunes which has overtaken others.”

— Alexander Smith

81. “Death takes away the commonplace of life.”

— Alexander Smith

82. “If we were to live here always, with no other care than how to feed, clothe, and house ourselves, life would be a very sorry business. It is immeasurably heightened by the solemnity of death.”

— Alexander Smith

83. “To be occasionally quoted is the only fame I care for.”

— Alexander Smith

84. “The only thing a man knows is himself.”

— Alexander Smith

85. “Winter does not work only on a broad scale; he is careful in trifles.”

— Alexander Smith

86. “The truly great rest in the knowledge of their own deserts, nor seek the conformation of the world.”

— Alexander Smith

87. “It is not of so much consequence what you say, as how you say it. Memorable sentences are memorable on account of some single irradiating word.”

— Alexander Smith