Alexander Smith Quotes
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In life there is nothing more unexpected and surprising than the arrivals and departures of pleasure. If we find it in one place today, it is vain to seek it there tomorrow. You can not lay a trap for it.
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Books are a finer world within the world.
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If you wish to preserve your secret, wrap it up in frankness.
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Trees are your best antiques.
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There is no ghost so difficult to lay as the ghost of an injury.
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The saddest thing that befalls a soul is when it loses faith in God and woman.
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Trifles make up the happiness or the misery of human life.
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Christmas is the day that holds all time together.
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I would rather be remembered by a song than by a victory.
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If you do your fair day's work, you are certain to get your fair day's wage - in praise or pudding, whichever happens to suit your taste.
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If the egotist is weak, his egotism is worthless. If the egotist is strong, acute, full of distinctive character, his egotism is precious, and remains a possession of the race.
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The sea complains upon a thousand shores.
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A man gazing on the stars is proverbially at the mercy of the puddles in the road.
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How deeply seated in the human heart is the liking for gardens and gardening.
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We are never happy; we can only remember that we were so once.
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A great man is the man who does something for the first time.
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Every man's road in life is marked by the graves of his personal liking.
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Death is the ugly fact which Nature has to hide, and she hides it well.
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I go into my library and all history unrolls before me.
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Everything is sweetened by risk.
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If you wish to make a man look noble, your best course is to kill him. What superiority he may have inherited from his race, what superiority nature may have personally gifted him with, comes out in death.
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A man doesn't plant a tree for himself. He plants it for posterity.
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The dead keep their secrets, and in a while we shall be as wise as they - and as taciturn.
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A man's real possession is his memory. In nothing else is he rich, in nothing else is he poor.