Alexander Smith

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

Everything is sweetened by risk.

Trees are your best antiques.

An old novel has a history of its own.

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

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

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

Books are a finer world within the world.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

Sweet April's tears, Dead on the hem of May.

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.

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

Christmas is the day that holds all time together.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 another, and the delight in the recognition.

It is not so much consequence what you say, as how you say it. Memorable sentences are memorable, on account of some single irradiating word.

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.

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.

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

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

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

We bury love; Forgetfulness grows over it like grass: That is a thing to weep for, not the dead.

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

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

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

The sea complains upon a thousand shores.