Logan Pearsall Smith

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

— Logan Pearsall Smith

Solvency is entirely a matter of temperament and not of income.

— Logan Pearsall Smith

Married women are kept women, and theyare beginning to find it out.

— Logan Pearsall Smith

What I like in a good author is not what he says but what he whispers.

— Logan Pearsall Smith

The world is not unkind, and reprobates are worse than their reputations.

— Logan Pearsall Smith

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

— Logan Pearsall Smith

I like to walk down Bond Street, thinking of all the things I don't desire.

— Logan Pearsall Smith

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

— Logan Pearsall Smith

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

— Logan Pearsall Smith

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

— Logan Pearsall Smith

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

— Logan Pearsall Smith

Charming people live up to the very edge of their charm, and behave as outrageously as the world will let them.

— Logan Pearsall Smith

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

— Logan Pearsall Smith

If we shake hands with icy fingers, it is because we have burnt them so horribly before.

— Logan Pearsall Smith

I find a fascination, like the fascination for the moth of a star, in those who hold aloof and disdain me.

— Logan Pearsall Smith

Those who talk on the razor-edge of double-meanings pluck the rarest blooms from the precipice on either side.

— Logan Pearsall Smith

“Then I though of reading -- the nice and subtle happiness of reading ... this joy not dulled by age, this polite…

— Logan Pearsall Smith

To become young again would seem to me an appalling prospect. Youth is a kind of delirium, which can be cured, if…

— Logan Pearsall Smith

“The indefatigable pursuit of an unattainable perfection, even though it consists in nothing more than in the pounding of an old piano,…

— Logan Pearsall Smith

But why wasn't I born, alas, in an age of Adjectives; why can one no longer write of silver-shedding Tears and moon-tailed…

— Logan Pearsall Smith

To suppose, as we all suppose, that we could be rich and not behave the way the rich behave, is like supposing…

— Logan Pearsall Smith

We need new friends; some of us are cannibals who have eaten their old friends up; others must have ever-renewed audiences before…

— Logan Pearsall Smith

I am one of the unpraised, unrewarded millions without whom Statistics would be a bankrupt science. It is we who are born,…

— Logan Pearsall Smith

A best-seller is the gilded tomb of a mediocre talent

— Logan Pearsall Smith

He who goes against the fashion is himself its slave

— Logan Pearsall Smith

There are few sorrows in which a good income is of no avail.

— Logan Pearsall Smith

How often my soul visits the National Gallery, and how seldom

— Logan Pearsall Smith

The notion of making money by popular work, and then retiring to do good work, is the most familiar of all the…

— Logan Pearsall Smith

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

— Logan Pearsall Smith

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

It's an odd thing about this universe that, though we all disagree with each other, we are all of us always in…

— Logan Pearsall Smith

Friends such as we desire are dreams and fables, yet we never quite give up the hope of finding them.

— Logan Pearsall Smith

Don't tell friends their social faults; they will cure the fault and never forgive you.

— Logan Pearsall Smith

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

— Logan Pearsall Smith

This nice and subtle happiness of reading, this joy not chilled by age, this polite and unpunished vice, this selfish, serene life-long…

— Logan Pearsall Smith

But man is above all a social and political animal; his relations with his fellow human beings form his most absorbing and…

— Logan Pearsall Smith

How many of our daydreams would darken into nightmares if there seemed any danger of their coming true!

— Logan Pearsall Smith

The denunciation of the young is a necessary part of the hygiene of older people, and greatly assists the circulation of the…

— Logan Pearsall Smith

“All Reformers, however strict their Conscience, live in houses just as big as they can pay for.”

— Logan Pearsall Smith

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

— Logan Pearsall Smith