Alexander Smith

To be occasionally quoted is the only fame I care for.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The man who in this world can keep the whiteness of his soul is not likely to lose it in any other.

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

The saddest thing that befalls a soul is when it loses faith in God and woman.

Every man's road in life is marked by the graves of his personal liking.

To sit for one's portrait is like being present at one's own creation.

There is no ghost so difficult to lay as the ghost of an injury.

We are never happy; we can only remember that we were so once.

If you wish to preserve your secret, wrap it up in frankness.

Trifles make up the happiness or the misery of human life.

I go into my library and all history unrolls before me.

Trees are your best antiques.

A man gazing on the stars is proverbially at the mercy of the puddles in the road.

Books are a finer world within the world.

Christmas is the day that holds all time together.

A great man is the man who does something for the first time.

The sea complains upon a thousand shores.

Everything is sweetened by risk.

We bury love; Forgetfulness grows over it like grass: That is a thing to weep for, not the dead.

A man doesn't plant a tree for himself. He plants it for posterity.