Logan Pearsall Smith

"Dont laugh at a youth for his affectations; he is only trying on one face after another to find his own."

"What music is more enchanting than the voices of young people, when you cant hear what they say?"

"I cannot forgive my friends for dying; I do not find these vanishing acts of theirs at all amusing."

"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 devils 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."

"There are few sorrows, however poignant, in which a good income is of no avail."

"How many of our daydreams would darken into nightmares if there seemed any danger of their coming true!"

"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."

"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 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."