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

- Alexander Smith

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

- Alexander Smith

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

- Alexander Smith

Everything is sweetened by risk.

- Alexander Smith

Books are a finer world within the world.

- 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

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

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

- Alexander Smith

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

- 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

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

- 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

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

- Alexander Smith

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

- Alexander Smith

Trees are your best antiques.

- Alexander Smith

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

- Alexander Smith

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

- Alexander Smith

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

- Alexander Smith

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

- Alexander Smith

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

- Alexander Smith