Top 100 Pearsall Quotes
#1. The wretchedness of being rich is that you 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 stay sober.
-Logan Pearsall Smith (1865-1946) US-English essayist, editor, anthologist
Logan Pearsall Smith
#2. Pearsall is not a doctor, or not, at least, one of the medical variety. He is a doctor of the variety that gets a Ph.D. and attaches it to his name on self-help book covers.
Mary Roach
#3. What really drives us to seek help is an equally frightening sensation: that of being alive, yet not really living.
Paul Pearsall
#4. One's own vanities and humiliations I find a delicious subject for conversation. Things said of me behind my back I don't enjoy, and don't listen to them.
Logan Pearsall Smith
#5. What is more mortifying than to feel that you have missed the plum for want of courage to shake the tree?
Logan Pearsall Smith
#7. A slight touch of friendly malice and amusement towards those we love keeps our affections for them from turning flat.
Logan Pearsall Smith
#8. True joy results when we become aware of our connectedness to everything.
Paul Pearsall
#9. But man is above all a social and political animal; his relations with his fellow human beings form his most absorbing and important interest.
Logan Pearsall Smith
#10. If they lost the incredible conviction that they can change their wives or husbands, marriage would collapse at once.
Logan Pearsall Smith
#11. 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 the ideal version of their lives.
Logan Pearsall Smith
#12. Yes there is a meaning; at least for me, there is one thing that matters - to set a chime of words tinkling in the minds of a few fastidious people.
Logan Pearsall Smith
#13. And whenever he's busy trying to be all he can be, he forgets about trying to be all we can be.
Paul Pearsall
#14. Happiness is a wine of the rarest vintage, and seems insipid to a vulgar taste.
Logan Pearsall Smith
#16. I began to fear that constant hoping might cause me to sacrifice today for the illusion of a better tomorrow. - The Last Self-Help Book You'll Ever Need
Paul Pearsall
#18. 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?
Logan Pearsall Smith
#19. Some angels are like peacocks. Others are less flashy. Like city pigeons. It all depends on the wings.
Shelley Pearsall
#20. There are people whose society I find delicious; but when I sit alone and think of them I shudder.
Logan Pearsall Smith
#21. The objective of two lovers is almost always the same; to find meaning in their individual lives and in their life together.
Paul Pearsall
#24. Shut up and listen. Research shows that people who interrupt are three times more likely to die of a heart attack than those who don't and that marital relationships usually fail because of too much communication, not too little. Couples who spend a lot of time being quiet together stay together.
Paul Pearsall
#25. What pursuit is more elegant than that of collecting the ignominies of our nature and transfixing them for show, each on the bright pin of a polished phrase?
Logan Pearsall Smith
#28. What's more enchanting than the voices of young people, when you can't hear what they say?
Logan Pearsall Smith
#29. All our lives we are putting pennies - our most golden pennies - into penny-in-the-slot machines that are almost always empty.
Logan Pearsall Smith
#32. You can resent your bald spot or be glad you have a head.
Paul Pearsall
#34. Eat with the rich, but go to the play with the poor, who are capable of joy.
Logan Pearsall Smith
#35. 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.
Logan Pearsall Smith
#36. Fine writers should split hairs together, and sit side by side, like friendly apes, to pick the fleas from each others fur.
Logan Pearsall Smith
#37. Our most basic instinct is not for survival but for family. Most of us would give our own life for the survival of a family member, yet we lead our daily life too often as if we take our family for granted.
Paul Pearsall
#41. The vitality of a new movement in Art must be gauged by the fury it arouses.
Logan Pearsall Smith
#42. What joy can the years bring half so sweet as the unhappiness they've taken away?
Logan Pearsall Smith
#43. People before the public live an imagined life in the thought of others, and flourish or feel faint as their self outside themselves grows bright or dwindles in that mirror.
Logan Pearsall Smith
#44. The denunciation of the young is a necessary part of the hygiene of older people, and greatly assists the circulation of the blood.
Logan Pearsall Smith
#45. I like to walk down Bond Street, thinking of all the things I don't desire.
Logan Pearsall Smith
#46. Growing old is not a gradual decline, but a series of drops, full of sorrow, from one ledge to another below it.
Logan Pearsall Smith
#47. Hearts that are delicate and kind and tongues that are neither - these make the finest company in the world
Logan Pearsall Smith
#48. Self-respecting people do not care to peep at their reflections in unexpected mirrors, or to see themselves as others see them.
Logan Pearsall Smith
#49. It is a matter of life and death for married people to interrupt each others stories; for it they did not, they would burst.
Logan Pearsall Smith
#50. How it infuriates a bigot, when he is forced to drag out his dark convictions!
Logan Pearsall Smith
#51. The indefatigable pursuit of an unattainable perfection, even though it consists in nothing more than in the pounding of an old piano, is what alone gives a meaning to our life on this unavailing star.
Logan Pearsall Smith
#52. Charming people live up to the very edge of their charm, and behave as outrageously as the world lets them.
Logan Pearsall Smith
#53. When elderly invalids meet with fellow-victims of their own ailments, then at last real conversation begins, and life is delicious.
Logan Pearsall Smith
#54. The five principles of aloha, when practiced together, awaken our awareness of our human potential and the sacredness of our life.
Paul Pearsall
#55. Most of the problems we think we have stem from too much self-focus rather than too little.
Paul Pearsall
#56. I find a fascination, like the fascination for the moth of a star, in those who hold aloof and disdain me.
Logan Pearsall Smith
#57. Addiction is not a fact of life but a description about how we are choosing to live.
Paul Pearsall
#59. A friend who loved perfection would be the perfect friend, did not that love shut his door on me.
Logan Pearsall Smith
#60. When they come downstairs from their Ivory Towers, idealists are very apt to walk straight into the gutter.
Logan Pearsall Smith
#61. Those who set out to serve both God and Mammon soon discover that there is no God.
Logan Pearsall Smith
#62. Youth is the time for adventures of the body, but age for the triumphs of the mind.
Logan Pearsall Smith
#64. Don't tell friends their social faults; they will cure the fault and never forgive you.
Logan Pearsall Smith
#65. The word 'silly' derives from the Greek 'selig' meaning 'blessed.' There is something sacred in being able to be silly.
Paul Pearsall
#66. All reformers, however strict their social conscience, live in houses just as big as they can pay for.
Logan Pearsall Smith
#67. How many of our daydreams would darken into nightmares
if there seemed any danger of their coming true!
Logan Pearsall Smith
#69. I am one of the unpraised, unrewarded millions without whom Statistics would be a bankrupt science. It is we who are born, who marry, who die, in constant ratios.
Logan Pearsall Smith
#70. It is the mark of an educated man to be able to evaluate a thought without accepting it. ARISTOTLE
Paul Pearsall
#71. There are few sorrows, however poignant, in which a good income is of no avail.
Logan Pearsall Smith
#72. To become young again would seem to me an appalling prospect. Youth is a kind of delirium, which can be cured, if it is ever cured at all, by years of painful treatment.
Logan Pearsall Smith
#73. There is more felicity on the far side of baldness than young men can possibly imagine.
Logan Pearsall Smith
#74. But why wasn't I born, alas, in an age of Adjectives; why can one no longer write of silver-shedding Tears and moon-tailed Peacocks, of eloquent Death, of the Negro and star-enameled Night?
Logan Pearsall Smith
#76. The lusts and greeds of the body scandalize the Soul; but it has to come to heel.
Logan Pearsall Smith
#77. Don't laugh at a youth for his affectations; he is only trying on one face after another to find his own.
Logan Pearsall Smith
#81. People have a right to be shocked; the mention of unmentionable things is a kind of participation in them.
Logan Pearsall Smith
#83. Don't Expect What Goes Around to Come Around. Total jerks and evil people often get all the good breaks. Being nice guarantees nothing. Good things happen to bad people. Sometimes, things just don't "balance out" or "work out for the best.
Paul Pearsall
#84. Most people sell their souls, and live with a good conscience on the proceeds.
Logan Pearsall Smith
#85. We need two kinds of acquaintances, one to complain to, while to the others we boast.
Logan Pearsall Smith
#86. It is the wretchedness of being rich that you have to live with rich people.
Logan Pearsall Smith
#88. What humbugs we are, who pretend to live for beauty, and never see the dawn!
Logan Pearsall Smith
#89. This nice and subtle happiness of reading, this joy not chilled by age, this polite and unpunished vice, this selfish, serene life-long intoxication.
Logan Pearsall Smith
#90. I might give my life for my friend, but he had better not ask me to do up a parcel.
Logan Pearsall Smith
#91. The mind-closing danger of biased beliefs occurs when we don't know we hold them. Sometimes we have to swallow our pride and engage in clear-eyed analysis.
Paul Pearsall
#92. We grow with years more fragile in body, but morally stouter, and can throw off the chill of a bad conscience almost at once.
Logan Pearsall Smith
#93. 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 stay sober.
Logan Pearsall Smith
#94. Many of our daydreams would darken into nightmares, were there a danger of their coming true!
Logan Pearsall Smith
#95. Money and sex are forces too unruly for our reason; they can only be controlled by taboos which we tamper with at our peril.
Logan Pearsall Smith
#96. All the pop psychologists are misleading people about things like guilt and conscience. Guilt is a noble emotion; the person without it is a monster.16
Paul Pearsall
#97. Whiskey has killed more men than bullets, but most men would rather be full of whiskey than bullets.
Logan Pearsall Smith
#99. Uncultivated minds are not full of wild flowers, like uncultivated fields. Villainous weeds grow in them and they are the haunt of toads.
Logan Pearsall Smith
#100. Marriage, families, all relationships are more a process of learning the dance rather than finding the right dancer
Paul Pearsall
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