The mere process of growing old together will make our slightest acquaintances seem like bosom friends.
— Logan Pearsall Smith
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.
Many of our daydreams would darken into nightmares, were there a danger of their coming true!
Those who set out to serve both God and Mammon soon discover that there isn't a God.
There are people who, like houses, are beautiful in dilapidation.
Most people sell their souls, and live with a good conscience on the proceeds.
If you want to be thought a liar, always tell the truth.
Happiness is a wine of the rarest vintage, and seems insipid to a vulgar taste.
The vitality of a new movement in Art must be gauged by the fury it arouses.
We need two kinds of acquaintances, one to complain to, while to the others we boast.
Solvency is entirely a matter of temperament and not of income.
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.
It is through the cracks in our brains that ecstasy creeps in.
Only a generation of readers will span a generation of writers.
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?
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 stay sober.
The denunciation of the young is a necessary part of the hygiene of older people, and greatly assists the circulation of the blood.
Only among people who think no evil can Evil monstrously flourish.
He who goes against the fashion is himself its slave.
How it infuriates a bigot, when he is forced to drag out his dark convictions!
Don't let young people tell you their aspirations; when they drop them they will drop you.
What joy can the years bring half so sweet as the unhappiness they've taken away?
A best-seller is the gilded tomb of a mediocre talent.
When they come downstairs from their Ivory Towers, idealists are very apt to walk straight into the gutter.
The old know what they want; the young are sad and bewildered.
What's more enchanting than the voices of young people, when you can't hear what they say?
What I like in a good author is not what he says but what he whispers.
What is more mortifying than to feel that you have missed the plum for want of courage to shake the tree?
Charming people live up to the very edge of their charm, and behave as outrageously as the world lets them.
It takes a great man to give sound advice tactfully, but a greater to accept it graciously.
It is the wretchedness of being rich that you have to live with rich people.
If you are losing your leisure, look out; you may be losing your soul.
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.
Hearts that are delicate and kind and tongues that are neither - these make the finest company in the world.
We grow with years more fragile in body, but morally stouter, and can throw off the chill of a bad conscience almost at once.
There is one thing that matters, to set a chime of words tinkling in the minds of a few fastidious people.
I can't forgive my friends for dying; I don't find these vanishing acts of theirs at all amusing.
A slight touch of friendly malice and amusement towards those we love keeps our affections for them from turning flat.
Our names are labels, plainly printed on the bottled essence of our past behavior.
Thank Heaven, the sun has gone in, and I don't have to go out and enjoy it.
There is more felicity on the far side of baldness than young men can possibly imagine.
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.
Every author, however modest, keeps a most outrageous vanity chained like a madman in the padded cell of his breast.
There are few sorrows, however poignant, in which a good income is of no avail.
The test of a vocation is the love of the drudgery it involves.
The newest books are those that never grow old.
Don't laugh at a youth for his affectations; he is only trying on one face after another to find a face of his own.
Those who set out to serve both God and Mammon soon discover that there is no God.
People say that life is the thing, but I prefer reading.
