Inspirational quotes by Logan Pearsall Smith.
People say that life is the thing, but I prefer reading.
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.
One late winter afternoon in Oxford Street, amid the noise of vehicles and voices that filled that dusky thoroughfare, as I was borne onward with the crowd past the great electric-lighted shops, a holy Indifference filled my thoughts. Illusion had faded from me; I was not touched by any desire for the goods displayed in those golden windows, nor had I the smallest share in the appetites and fears of all those moving and anxious faces. And as I listened with Asiatic detachment to the London traffic, its sound changed into something ancient and dissonant and sad—into the turbid flow of that stream of Craving which sweeps men onward through the meaningless cycles of Existence, blind and enslaved forever. But I had reached the farther shore, the Harbour of Deliverance, the Holy City; the Great Peace beyond all this turmoil and fret compassed me around. Om Mani padme hum—I murmured the sacred syllables, smiling with the pitying smile of the Enlightened One on his heavenly lotus.Then, in a shop-window, I saw a neatly fitted suit-case. I liked that suit-case; I desired to possess it. Immediately I was enveloped by the mists of Illusion, chained once more to the Wheel of Existence, whirled onward along Oxford Street in that turbid stream of wrong-belief, and lust, and sorrow, and anger.
Every author, however modest, keeps a most outrageous vanity chained like a madman in the padded cell of his breast.
How many of our daydreams would darken into nightmaresif there seemed any danger of their coming true!
What I like in a good author is not what he says, but what he whispers.
The denunciation of the young is a necessary part of the hygiene of older people and greatly assists the circulation of their blood.
One can be bored until boredom becomes a mystical experience.
Those who set out to serve both God and Mammon soon discover that there is no God.
What is more mortifying than to feel that you have missed the plum for want of courage to shake the tree?
I cannot forgive my friends for dying: I do not find these vanishing acts of theirs at all amusing.
There are two things to aim at in life: first to get what you want and after that to enjoy it.
How can they say my life is not a success? Have I not for more than sixty years gotten enough to eat and escaped being eaten?
We need new friends. Some of us are cannibals who have eaten their old friends up others must have ever-renewed audiences before whom to re-enact an ideal version of their lives.
Don't tell your friends their social faults they will cure the fault and never forgive you.
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.
The test of enjoyment is the remembrance which it leaves behind.
Married women are kept women and they are beginning to find it out.
The wretchedness of being rich is that you live with rich people.
An improper mind is a perpetual feast.
Most people sell their souls and live with a good conscience on the proceeds.
What humbugs we are who pretend to live for Beauty and never see the Dawn!
Charming people live up to the very edge of their charm and behave as outrageously as the world will let them.
How it infuriates a bigot when he is forced to drag out his dark convictions!
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