Logan Pearsall Smith quotes - page 3

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? (Logan Pearsall Smith)
He who goes against the fashion is himself its slave. View quote
Logan Pearsall Smith
Hearts that are delicate and kind and tongues that are neither - these make the finest company in the world. View quote
Logan Pearsall Smith
Don't let young people tell you their aspirations; when they drop them they will drop you. View quote
Logan Pearsall Smith
Only among people who think no evil can Evil monstrously flourish. View quote
Logan Pearsall Smith
How it infuriates a bigot, when he is forced to drag out his dark convictions! View quote
Logan Pearsall Smith
The mere process of growing old together will make our slightest acquaintances seem like bosom friends. View quote
Logan Pearsall Smith
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 and sympathy urgent enough to turn a weaker nature into a benign sentimentalist. View quote
Logan Pearsall Smith
We grow with years more fragile in body, but morally stutter, and can throw off the chill of a bad conscience almost at once. View quote
Logan Pearsall Smith
Those who set out to serve both God and Mammon soon discover that there isn't a God. View quote
Logan Pearsall Smith
Only a generation of readers will span a generation of writers. (Logan Pearsall Smith)
The newest books are those that never grow old. View quote
Logan Pearsall Smith
The truth is that the phenomena of artistic production are still so obscure, so baffling, we are still so far from an accurate scientific and psychological knowledge of their genesis or meaning, that we are forced to accept them as empirical facts; and empirical and non-explanatory names are the names that suit them best. The complete explanation of any fact is the very last step in human thought; and it is reached, as I have said, if indeed it is ever reached, by the preliminary processes of recognition, designation, and definition. It is with these preliminary processes that our aesthetic criticism is still occupied. View quote
Logan Pearsall Smith
There are readers-and I am one of them-whose reading is rather like a series of intoxications. We fall in love with a book; it is our book, we feel, for life; we shall not need another. We cram-throat our friends with it in the cruellest fashion; make it a Gospel, which we preach in a spirit of propaganda and indignation, putting a woe on the world for a neglect of which last week we were equally guilty. View quote
Logan Pearsall Smith