Logan Pearsall Smith Quotes
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What joy can the years bring half so sweet as the unhappiness they've taken away?
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It is through the cracks in our brains that ecstasy creeps in.
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Youth is the time for adventures of the body, but age for the triumphs of the mind.
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Hearts that are delicate and kind and tongues that are neither - these make the finest company in the world.
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Money and sex are forces too unruly for our reason; they can only be controlled by taboos with which we tamper at our peril.
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The truth is that the phenomena of artistic production are still so obscure, so baffling, we are still so far from an accurate scientific and psychological knowledge of their genesis or meaning, that we are forced to accept them as empirical facts; and empirical and non-explanatory names are the names that suit them best.
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How awful to reflect that what people say of us is true!
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To become young again would seem to me an appalling prospect. Youth is a kind of delirium, which can be cured, if it is ever cured at all, by years of painful treatment.
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A friend who loved perfection would be the perfect friend, did not that love shut his door on me.
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When they come downstairs from their Ivory Towers, idealists are very apt to walk straight into the gutter.
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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.
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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?
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What shall I compare it to, this fantastic thing I call my Mind? To a waste-paper basket, to a sieve choked with sediment, or to a barrel full of floating froth and refuse? No, what it is really most like is a spider's web, insecurely hung on leaves and twigs, quivering in every wind, and sprinkled with dewdrops and dead flies. And at its centre, pondering forever the Problem of Existence, sits motionless the spider-like and uncanny Soul.
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Growing old is not a gradual decline, but a series of drops, full of sorrow, from one ledge to another below it.
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Whiskey has killed more men than bullets, but most men would rather be full of whiskey than bullets.
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I can't forgive my friends for dying; I don't find these vanishing acts of theirs at all amusing.
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What is more mortifying than to feel that you have missed the plum for want of courage to shake the tree?
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Style is a magic wand, and turns everything to gold that it touches.
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But man is above all a social and political animal; his relations with his fellow human beings form his most absorbing and important interest.
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The great art of writing is the art of making people real to themselves with words.
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The test of enjoyment is the remembrance which it leaves behind.
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It is a matter of life and death for married people to interrupt each others stories; for it they did not, they would burst.
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If they lost the incredible conviction that they can change their wives or husbands, marriage would collapse at once.
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The test of a vocation is the love of the drudgery it involves.
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When we say we are certain so-and-so can't possibly have done it, what we mean is that we think he very likely did.
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Every author, however modest, keeps a most outrageous vanity chained like a madman in the padded cell of his breast.
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The vitality of a new movement in Art must be gauged by the fury it arouses.
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We should nourish our souls on the dew of Poesy, and manure them as well.
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If we shake hands with icy fingers, it is because we have burnt them so horribly before.
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So, I never lose a sense of the whimsical and perilous charm of daily life, with its meetings and words and accidents.
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