Top 90 Logan Pearsall Smith Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Whiskey has killed more men than bullets, but most men would rather be full of whiskey than bullets.”

— Logan Pearsall Smith

2. “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

3. “If you want to be thought a liar, always tell the truth.”

— Logan Pearsall Smith

4. “What is more mortifying than to feel that you have missed the plum for want of courage to shake the tree?”

— Logan Pearsall Smith

5. “The indefatigable pursuit of an unattainable perfection -even though nothing more than the pounding of an old piano -is what alone gives a meaning to our life on this unavailing star.”

— Logan Pearsall Smith

6. “People say that life is the thing, but I prefer reading.”

— Logan Pearsall Smith

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7. “An echo of music, a face in the street, the wafer of the new moon, a wanton thought – only in the iridescence of things the vagabond soul is happy.”

— Logan Pearsall Smith

8. “Eat with the rich, but go to the play with the poor, who are capable of joy.”

— Logan Pearsall Smith

9. “Our names are labels, plainly printed on the bottled essence of our past behavior.”

— Logan Pearsall Smith

10. “An improper mind is a perpetual feast.”

— Logan Pearsall Smith

11. “Hearts that are delicate and kind and tongues that are neither – these make the finest company in the world.”

— Logan Pearsall Smith

12. “The test of a vocation is the love of the drudgery it involves.”

— Logan Pearsall Smith

13. “The great art of writing is the art of making people real to themselves with words.”

— Logan Pearsall Smith

14. “But man is above all a social and political animal; his relations with his fellow human beings form his most absorbing and important interest.”

— Logan Pearsall Smith

15. “How often my soul visits the National Gallery, and how seldom.”

— Logan Pearsall Smith

16. “What humbugs we are, who pretend to live for beauty, and never see the dawn!”

— Logan Pearsall Smith

17. “A slight touch of friendly malice and amusement towards those we love keeps our affections for them from turning flat.”

— Logan Pearsall Smith

18. “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

19. “The denunciation of the young is a necessary part of the hygiene of older people, and greatly assists the circulation of the blood.”

— Logan Pearsall Smith

20. “We grow with years more fragile in body, but morally stutter, and can throw off the chill of a bad conscience almost at once.”

— Logan Pearsall Smith

21. “All mirrors are magical mirrors, and we never see our faces in them.”

— Logan Pearsall Smith

22. “Fine writers should split hairs together, and sit side by side, like friendly apes, to pick the fleas from each others fur.”

— Logan Pearsall Smith

23. “Growing old is not a gradual decline, but a series of drops, full of sorrow, from one ledge to another below it.”

— Logan Pearsall Smith

24. “People before the public live an imagined life in the thought of others, and flourish or feel faint as their self outside themselves grows bright or dwindles in that mirror.”

— Logan Pearsall Smith

25. “All reformers, however strict their social conscience, live in houses just as big as they can pay for.”

— Logan Pearsall Smith

26. “Thank heavens, the sun has gone in and I don’t have to go out and enjoy it.”

— Logan Pearsall Smith

27. “I might give my life for my friend, but he had better not ask me to do up a parcel.”

— Logan Pearsall Smith

28. “So, I never lose a sense of the whimsical and perilous charm of daily life, with its meetings and words and accidents.”

— Logan Pearsall Smith

29. “Happiness is a wine of the rarest vintage, and seems insipid to a vulgar taste.”

— Logan Pearsall Smith

30. “There is more felicity on the far side of baldness than young men can possibly imagine.”

— Logan Pearsall Smith

31. “Youth is the time for adventures of the body, but age for the triumphs of the mind.”

— Logan Pearsall Smith

32. “I like to walk down Bond Street, thinking of all the things I don’t desire.”

— Logan Pearsall Smith

33. “The ladies who try to keep their beauty are the ladies who lose it.”

— Logan Pearsall Smith

34. “If you are losing your leisure, look out! You are losing your soul.”

— Logan Pearsall Smith

35. “When they come downstairs from their Ivory Towers, idealists are very apt to walk straight into the gutter.”

— Logan Pearsall Smith

36. “You cannot be both fashionable and first-rate.”

— Logan Pearsall Smith

37. “He who goes against the fashion is himself its slave.”

— Logan Pearsall Smith

38. “The test of enjoyment is the remembrance which it leaves behind.”

— Logan Pearsall Smith

39. “One can be bored until boredom becomes a mystical experience.”

— Logan Pearsall Smith

40. “Most people sell their souls, and live with a good conscience on the proceeds.”

— Logan Pearsall Smith

41. “Don’t tell friends their social faults; they will cure the fault and never forgive you.”

— Logan Pearsall Smith

42. “This nice and subtle happiness of reading, this joy not chilled by age, this polite and unpunished vice, this selfish, serene life-long intoxication.”

— Logan Pearsall Smith

43. “For souls in growth, great quarrels are great emancipations.”

— Logan Pearsall Smith

44. “Style is a magic wand, and turns everything to gold that it touches.”

— Logan Pearsall Smith

45. “I can’t forgive my friends for dying; I don’t find these vanishing acts of theirs at all amusing.”

— Logan Pearsall Smith

46. “The emergence of a new term to describe a certain phenomenon, of a new adjective to designate a certain quality, is always of interest, both linguistically and from the point of view of the history of human thought.”

— Logan Pearsall Smith

47. “Self-respecting people do not care to peep at their reflections in unexpected mirrors, or to see themselves as others see them.”

— Logan Pearsall Smith

48. “Uncultivated minds are not full of wild flowers, like uncultivated fields. Villainous weeds grow in them and they are the haunt of toads.”

— Logan Pearsall Smith

49. “We need new friends; some of us are cannibals who have eaten their old friends up; others must have ever-renewed audiences before whom to re-enact the ideal version of their lives.”

— Logan Pearsall Smith

50. “There are people who, like houses, are beautiful in dilapidation.”

— Logan Pearsall Smith