Logan Pearsall Smith

What joy can the years bring half so sweet as the unhappiness they've taken away?

The newest books are those that never grow old.

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.

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

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

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.

There is more felicity on the far side of baldness than young men can possibly imagine.

The old know what they want; the young are sad and bewildered.

Happiness is a wine of the rarest vintage, and seems insipid to a vulgar taste.

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

Our names are labels, plainly printed on the bottled essence of our past behavior.

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

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

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

I can't forgive my friends for dying; I don't find these vanishing acts of theirs at all amusing.

Don't let young people tell you their aspirations; when they drop them they will drop you.

Those who set out to serve both God and Mammon soon discover that there isn't a God.

There is one thing that matters, to set a chime of words tinkling in the minds of a few fastidious people.

Many of our daydreams would darken into nightmares, were there a danger of their coming true!

We grow with years more fragile in body, but morally stouter, and can throw off the chill of a bad conscience almost at once.

He who goes against the fashion is himself its slave.

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.

Hearts that are delicate and kind and tongues that are neither - these make the finest company in the world.

Only among people who think no evil can Evil monstrously flourish.

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