Alexander Smith

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

A man gazing on the stars is proverbially at the mercy of the puddles in the road.

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

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

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

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.

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

I would rather be remembered by a song than by a victory.

The saddest thing that befalls a soul Is when it loses faith in God and woman.

The sea complains upon a thousand shores.

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.

Christmas is the day that holds all time together.

I go into my library and all history unrolls before me.

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

Every man’s road in life is marked by the graves of his personal liking.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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 are never happy; we can only remember that we were so once.

Everything is sweetened by risk.

Death is the ugly fact which Nature has to hide, and she hides it well.

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

A man doesn’t plant a tree for himself. He plants it for posterity.

A great man is the man who does something for the first time.

Books are a finer world within the world.