Quote

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?

Logan Pearsall Smith

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Logan Pearsall Smith
Age: 80 †
Born: 1865
Born: October 18
Died: 1946
Died: March 2
Author
Literary Critic
Writer
Millville
New Jersey
Lloyd Logan Pearsall Smith
Show
Pins
Shows
Autobiography
Nature
Collecting
Elegant
Phrase
Phrases
Bright
Ignominy
Pursuit
Polished

More quotes by Logan Pearsall Smith

Image
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
Image
If you want to be thought a liar, always tell the truth
Logan Pearsall Smith
Image
All our lives we are putting pennies — our most golden pennies — into penny-in-the-slot machines that are almost always empty.
Logan Pearsall Smith
Image
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.
Logan Pearsall Smith
Image
Those who talk on the razor-edge of double-meanings pluck the rarest blooms from the precipice on either side.
Logan Pearsall Smith
Image
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
Image
One can be bored until boredom becomes a mystical experience.
Logan Pearsall Smith
Image
Every author, however modest, keeps a most outrageous vanity chained like a madman in the padded cell of his breast.
Logan Pearsall Smith
Image
The notion of making money by popular work, and then retiring to do good work, is the most familiar of all the devil's traps for artists.
Logan Pearsall Smith
Image
The world is not unkind, and reprobates are worse than their reputations.
Logan Pearsall Smith
Image
All my life, as down an abyss without a bottom. I have been pouring van loads of information into that vacancy of oblivion I call my mind.
Logan Pearsall Smith
Image
All reformers, however strict their social conscience, live in houses just as big as they can pay for.
Logan Pearsall Smith
Image
The test of a vocation is the love of the drudgery it involves.
Logan Pearsall Smith
Image
Money and sex are forces too unruly for our reason they can only be controlled by taboos with which we tamper at our peril.
Logan Pearsall Smith
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
What humbugs we are, who pretend to live for beauty, and never see the dawn!
Logan Pearsall Smith
Image
Friends such as we desire are dreams and fables, yet we never quite give up the hope of finding them.
Logan Pearsall Smith
Image
He who goes against the fashion is himself its slave
Logan Pearsall Smith