Logan Pearsall Smith Quotes
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What music is more enchanting than the voices of young people, when you can't hear what they say?
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Experience is always seeking for special literary forms in which its various aspects can find their most adequate expression; and there are many of these aspects which are best rendered in a fragmentary fashion, because they are themselves fragments of experience, gleams and flashes of light, rather than the steady glow of a larger illumination.
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The notion of making money by popular work, and then retiring to do good work on the proceeds, is the most familiar of all the devil's traps for artists.
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The indefatigable pursuit of an unattainable perfection, even though it consist in nothing more than the pounding of an old piano, is what alone gives a meaning to our life on this unavailing star.
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There are two things to aim at in life: first, to get what you want; and, after that, to enjoy it. Only the wisest of mankind achieve the second.
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The denunciation of the young is a necessary part of the hygiene of older people, and greatly assists in the circulation of their blood.
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We frequently fall into error and folly, Dr. Johnson tells us, 'not because the true principles of action are not known, but because, for a time, they are not remembered.' To compress, therefore, the great and obvious rules of life into brief sentences which are not easily forgotten is, as he said, to confer a real benefit upon us.
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Thank heavens, the sun has gone in, and I don't have to go out and enjoy it.
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criticizing the Cambridge School of criticism, e.g. John Middleton Murry and Herbert Read, 'Fine Writing,' pp. 306-307
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Few things are more shocking to those who practice the arts of success than the frank description of those arts.
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The disconnected impressions which we derive from life form a kind of knowledge ‘in growth,’ as Bacon called it; an over-early and peremptory attempt to digest this knowledge into a system tends, as he suggests, to falsify and distort it.
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Don't laugh at a youth for his affectations; he is only trying on one face after another to find his own.
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To suppose, as we all suppose, that we could be rich and not behave as the rich behave, is like supposing that we could drink all day and keep absolutely sober.
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The enormous and half-educated publics of present-day England and America… acclaim as masterpieces books that are soon forgotten, while ignoring all that is exquisite and rare.
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What draws us to him so closely is that he combined a disillusioned estimate of human nature sufficient to launch twenty little cynics, with a craving for love any sympathy urgent enough to turn a weaker nature into a benign sentimentalist.
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Most people sell their souls, and live with a good conscience on the proceeds.
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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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People say that life is the thing, but I prefer reading.
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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?
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'Montaigne,' p. 1
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The test of a vocation is the love of the drudgery it involves.
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That one should practice what one preaches is generally agreed, but anyone who has the indiscretion to preach what both he and his hearers practice must always incur-as Lord Chesterfield has incurred-the gravest moral reprobation.
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May it the opposition to fine writing be accounted for by the fact that the spirit of Puritanism, having been banished from the province of moral conduct, has found a refuge among the arts?
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There are few sorrows, however poignant, in which a good income is of no avail.