Best 87 quotes of Alexander Smith on MyQuotes

One never hugs one's good luck so affectionately as when listening to the relation of some horrible misfortunes which has overtaken others.

Pleasure has no logic; it never treads in its own footsteps.

Seated in my library at night, and looking on the silent faces of my books, I am occasionally visited by a strange sense of the supernatural.

Some books are drenchèd sandsOn which a great soul's wealth lies all in heaps,Like a wrecked argosy.

Stirling, like a huge brooch, clasps Highlands and Lowlands together.

Style, after all, rather than thought, is the immortal thing in literature.

Sweet April's tears, Dead on the hem of May.

The dead keep their secrets, and in a while we shall be as wise as they - and as taciturn.

The discovery of a grey hair when you are brushing out your whiskers of a morning - first fallen flake of the coming snows of age - is a disagreeable thing.

The discovery of a grey hair when you are brushing out your whiskers of a morning—first fallen flake of the coming snows of age—is a disagreeable thing.... So are flying twinges of gout, shortness of breath on the hill-side, the fact that even the moderate use of your friend's wines at dinner upsets you. These things are disagreeable because they tell you that you are no longer young—that you have passed through youth, are now in middle age, and faring onward to the shadows in which, somewhere, a grave is hid.

The globe has been circumnavigated, but no man ever yet has; you may survey a kingdom and note the result in maps, but all the savants in the world could not produce a reliable map of the poorest human personality.

The greatness of an artist or a writer does not depend on what he has in common with other artists and writers, but on what he has peculiar to himself.

The man who in this world can keep the whiteness of his soul is not likely to lose it in any other.

The pale child, Eve, leading her mother, Night.

The pleased sea on a white-breasted shore-- A shore that wears on her alluring brows Rare shells, far brought, the love-gifts of the sea, That blushed a tell-tale.

There is a certain even-handed justice in Time; and for what he takes away he gives us something in return. He robs us of elasticity of limb and spirit, and in its place he brings tranquility and repose—the mild autumnal weather of the soul.

There is a slow-growing beauty which only comes to perfection in old age.... I have seen sweeter smiles on a lip of seventy than I ever saw on a lip of seventeen. There is the beauty of youth, and there is also the beauty of holiness—a beauty much more seldom met; and more frequently found in the arm-chair by the fire, with grandchildren around its knee, than in the ball-room or the promenade.

There is no ghost so difficult to lay as the ghost of an injury.

The saddest thing that befalls a soul is when it loses faith in god and woman.

The sea complains upon a thousand shores.

The sun was down, And all the west was paved with sullen fire. I cried, Behold! the barren beach of hell At ebb of tide.

The truly great rest in the knowledge of their own deserts, nor seek the conformation of the world.

The world is not so much in need of new thoughts as that when thought grows old and worn with usage it should, like current coin, be called in, and, from the mint of genius, reissued fresh and new.

To be occasionally quoted is the only fame I care for.

To bring the best human qualities to anything like perfection, to fill them with the sweet juices of courtesy and charity, prosperity, or, at all events, a moderate amount of it, is required,--just as sunshine is needed for the ripening of peaches and apricots.

To-day is always different from yesterday.

To have to die is a distinction of which no man is proud.

To sit for one's portrait is like being present at one's own creation.

Trifles make up the happiness or the misery of mortal life.

Trees are your best antiques

We bury love; Forgetfulness grows over it like grass: That is a thing to weep for, not the dead.

We have two lives; The soul of man is like the rolling world, One half in day, the other dipt in night; The one has music and the flying cloud, The other, silence and the wakeful stars.

We twain have met like the ships upon the sea, Who behold an hour's converse, so short, so sweet: One little hour! and then, away they speed On lonely paths, through mist, and cloud, and foam, To meet no more.

Yet through all, we know this tangled skein is in the hands of One, Who sees the end from the beginning: He shall unravel all.

Your death and my death are mainly of importance to ourselves. The black plumes will be stripped off our hearses within the hour; tears will dry, hurt hearts close again, our graves grow level with the church-yard, and although we are away, the world wags on. It does not miss us; and those who are near us, when the first strangeness of vacancy wears off, will not miss us much either.

Books are a finer world within the world. (1863)

If a man is worth knowing at all, he is worth knowing well.