Logan Pearsall Smith

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__nto 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__ 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.

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.

It takes a great man to give sound advice tactfully, but a greater to accept it graciously.

The old know what they want the young are sad and bewildered.

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.

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 denunciation of the young is a necessary part of the hygiene of older people, and greatly assists the circulation of the blood.

Don't laugh at a youth for his affectations he's only trying on one face after another till he finds his own.

Every author however modest keeps a most outrageous vanity chained like a madman in the padded cell of his breast.

What I like in a good author is not what he says but what he whispers.

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?

How can they say my life isn't a success? Have I not for more than sixty years got enough to eat and escaped being eaten?

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

Self-respecting people do not care to peep at their reflections in unexpected mirrors or to see themselves as others see them.

Solvency is entirely a matter of temperament not of income.

The test of a vocation is the love of the drudgery it involves.