Logan Pearsall Smith
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"Logan Pearsall Smith" was an American-born essayist and critic who became a British subject in 1913. Harvard and Oxford educated, he was known for his aphorisms and epigrams, and was an expert on 17th-century divines. His Words and Idioms made him an authority on correct English language usage. He wrote his autobiography, Unforgotten Years, for which he may be best remembered.

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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.

The mere process of growing old together will make our slightest acquaintances seem like bosom friends.

How many of our daydreams would darken into nightmares if there seemed any danger of their coming true!

It is through the cracks in our brains that ecstasy creeps in.

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?

There are few sorrows in which a good income is of no avail.

Solvency is entirely a matter of temperament and not of income.

The denunciation of the young is a necessary part of the hygiene of older people, and greatly assists the circulation of the blood.

Every author, however modest, keeps a most outrageous vanity chained like a madman in the padded cell of his breast.

People before the public live an imagined life in the thought of others, and flourish or feel faint as their self outside themselves grows bright or dwindles in that mirror.

Most people sell their souls, and live with a good conscience on the proceeds.

A best seller is the gilded tomb of a mediocre talent.

Style is a magic wand, and turns everything to gold that it touches.

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.

It is the wretchedness of being rich that you have to live with rich people.

The indefatigable pursuit of an unattainable perfection, even though it consists in nothing more than the pounding of an old piano, is what alone gives meaning to our life on this unavailing star.

When they come downstairs from their Ivory Towers, Idealists are very apt to walk straight into the gutter.

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.

What is more mortifying than to feel that you have missed the plum for want of courage to shake the tree?

What music is more enchanting than the voices of young people, when you can't hear what they say?

I cannot forgive my friends for dying; I do not find these vanishing acts of theirs at all amusing.

Thank heavens the sun has gone in, and I don't have to go out and enjoy it.

The test of a vocation is the love of the drudgery it involves.

People say that life is the thing, but I prefer reading.

Almost all reformers, however strict their social conscience, live in houses just as big as they can pay for.

There are few sorrows, however poignant, in which a good income is of no avail.