Logan Pearsall Smith
58 quotes
Biography
"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?"
"People say that life is the thing, but I prefer reading."
"The vitality of a new movement in Art must be gauged by the fury it arouses."
"The indefatigable pursuit of an unattainable perfection ...***...is what alone gives meaning to our life on this unavailing star."
"The emergence of a new term to describe a certain phenomenon, of a new adjective to designate a certain quality, is always of interest, both linguistically and from the point of view of the history of human thought. That history would be a much simpler matter (and language, too, a much more precise instrument) if new thoughts on their appearance, and new facts at their discovery, could at once be analysed and explained and named with scientific precision. But even in science this seldom happens; we find rather that a whole complex group of facts, like those for instance of gas or electricity, are at first somewhat vaguely noticed, and are given, more or less by chance, a name like that of gas, which is an arbitrary formation, or that of electricity, which is derived from the attractive power of electrum or amber when rubbed — the first electric phenomenon to be noticed."
"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."
"The denunciation of the young is a necessary part of the hygiene of older people, and greatly assists in the circulation of their blood."
"Don't laugh at a youth for his affectations; he is only trying on one face after another to find his own."
"I cannot forgive my friends for dying; I do not find these vanishing acts of theirs at all amusing."
"What music is more enchanting than the voices of young people, when you can't hear what they say?"
"The test of a vocation is the love of the drudgery it involves."
"The notion of making money by popular work, and then retiring to do good work on the proceeds, is the most familiar of all the devil's traps for artists."
"It is the wretchedness of being rich that you have to live with rich people."
"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 keep absolutely sober."
"How many of our daydreams would darken into nightmares if there seemed any danger of their coming true!"
"There are few sorrows, however poignant, in which a good income is of no avail."
"The indefatigable pursuit of an unattainable perfection, even though it consist in nothing more than the pounding of an old piano, is what alone gives a meaning to our life on this unavailing star."
"All Reformers, however strict their social conscience, live in houses just as big as they can pay for."
"Thank heavens, the sun has gone in, and I don't have to go out and enjoy it."
"Perhaps not only in his attitude towards truth, but in his attitude towards himself, Montaigne was a precursor. Perhaps here again he was ahead of his own time, ahead of our time also, since none of us would have the courage to imitate him. It may be that some future century will vindicate this unseemly performance; in the meanwhile it will be of interest to examine the reasons which he gives us for it. He says, in the first place, that he found this study of himself, this registering of his moods and imaginations, extremely amusing; it was an exploration of an unknown region, full of the queerest chimeras and monsters, a new art of discovery, in which he had become by practice “the cunningest man alive.” It was profitable also, for most people enjoy their pleasures without knowing it; they glide over them, and fix and feed their minds on the miseries of life. But to observe and record one’s pleasant experiences and imaginations, to associate one’s mind with them, not to let them dully and unfeelingly escape us, was to make them not only more delightful but more lasting. As life grows shorter we should endeavour, he says, to make it deeper and more full. But he found moral profit also in this self-study; for how, he asked, can we correct our vices if we do not know them, how cure the diseases of our soul if we never observe their symptoms? The man who has not learned to know himself is not the master, but the slave of life: he is the “explorer without knowledge, the magistrate without jurisdiction, and when all is done, the fool of the play.”"
"It is certainly curious that among all the millions of books that have been written on every conceivable subject, so few writers have really tried to describe the tissue of their thoughts and the actual taste of consciousness. And yet this is, after all, our most immediate and direct experience, the only experience of whose reality we are absolutely certain."
"Experience is always seeking for special literary forms in which its various aspects can find their most adequate expression; and there are many of these aspects which are best rendered in a fragmentary fashion, because they are themselves fragments of experience, gleams and flashes of light, rather than the steady glow of a larger illumination."
"The disconnected impressions which we derive from life form a kind of knowledge ‘in growth,’ as Bacon called it; an over-early and peremptory attempt to digest this knowledge into a system tends, as he suggests, to falsify and distort it."
"We frequently fall into error and folly, Dr. Johnson tells us, “not because the true principles of action are not known, but because, for a time, they are not remembered.” To compress, therefore, the great and obvious rules of life into brief sentences which are not easily forgotten is, as he said, to confer a real benefit upon us."
"Few things are more shocking to those who practice the arts of success than the frank description of those arts."