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The dead keep their secrets, and in a while we shall be as wise as they - and as taciturn.

Alexander Smith

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Alexander Smith
Age: 36 †
Born: 1830
Born: December 31
Died: 1867
Died: January 5
Poet
Cille Mheàrnaig
Wise
Shall
Secret
Keep
Taciturn
Secrets
Dead

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Fame is but an inscription on a grave, and glory the melancholy blazon on a coffin lid.
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My friend is not perfect-no more than I am-and so we suit each other admirable.
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In my garden I spend my days in my library I spend my nights.
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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.
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God has thickly strewn infinity with grandeur.
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Love is but the discovery of ourselves in others, and the delight in the recognition.
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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.
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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.
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Death is the ugly fact which Nature has to hide, and she hides it well.
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Men praise poverty, as the African worships Mumbo Jumbo--from terror of the malign power, and a desire to propitiate at.
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It is the sternest philosophy, but on the whole the truest, that, in the wide arena of the world, failure and success are not accidents, as we so frequently suppose, but the strictest justice.
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The greatness of an artist or a writer does not depend on what he has in common with other artists and writers, but on what he has peculiar to himself.
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My heart like moon-charmed waters, all unrest.
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We have two lives The soul of man is like the rolling world, One half in day, the other dipt in night The one has music and the flying cloud, The other, silence and the wakeful stars.
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Happiness never lays its finger on its pulse. If we attempt to steal a glimpse of its features it disappears.
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The globe has been circumnavigated, but no man ever yet has you may survey a kingdom and note the result in maps, but all the savants in the world could not produce a reliable map of the poorest human personality.
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The saddest thing that befalls a soul is when it loses faith in god and woman.
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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.
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Sweet April's tears, Dead on the hem of May.
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An old novel has a history of its own.
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