Alexander Smith quotes

Love is but the discovery of ourselves in others, and the delight in the recognition.
- Alexander Smith

If you do your fair day's work, you are certain to get your fair day's wage - in praise or pudding, whichever happens to suit your taste.
- Alexander Smith

To our graves we walk In the thick footprints of departed men.
- Alexander Smith

If you wish to preserve your secret, wrap it up in frankness.
- Alexander Smith

If you wish to make a man look noble, your best course is to kill him. What superiority he may have inherited from his race, what superiority nature may have personally gifted him with, comes out in death.
- Alexander Smith

An old novel has a history of its own.
- Alexander Smith

In life there is nothing more unexpected and surprising than the arrivals and departures of pleasure. If we find it in one place today, it is vain to seek it there tomorrow. You can not lay a trap for it.
- Alexander Smith

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.
- Alexander Smith

If we were to live here always, with no other care than how to feed, clothe, and house ourselves, life would be a very sorry business. It is immeasurably heightened by the solemnity of death.
- Alexander Smith

I would rather be remembered by a song than by a victory.
- Alexander Smith

A man’s real possession is his memory. In nothing else is he rich, in nothing else is he poor.
- Alexander Smith

If the egotist is weak, his egotism is worthless. If the egotist is strong, acute, full of distinctive character, his egotism is precious, and remains a possession of the race.
- Alexander Smith

Happiness never lays its finger on its pulse. If we attempt to steal a glimpse of its features it disappears.
- Alexander Smith

In the entire circle of the year there are no days so delightful as those of a fine October.
- Alexander Smith

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.
- Alexander Smith

How deeply seated in the human heart is the liking for gardens and gardening.
- Alexander Smith

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.
- Alexander Smith

The pale child, Eve, leading her mother, Night.
- Alexander Smith