Logan Pearsall Smith
Overview
 
Logan Pearsall Smith was an American-born essayist and critic.

Smith was born in Millville, New Jersey
Millville, New Jersey
Millville is a city in Cumberland County, New Jersey, United States. As of the 2000 United States Census, the city population was 26,847. Millville, Bridgeton and Vineland are the three principal New Jersey cities of the Vineland-Millville-Bridgeton Primary Metropolitan Statistical Area which...

 the son of the prominent Quaker
Religious Society of Friends
The Religious Society of Friends, or Friends Church, is a Christian movement which stresses the doctrine of the priesthood of all believers. Members are known as Friends, or popularly as Quakers. It is made of independent organisations, which have split from one another due to doctrinal differences...

s Robert Pearsall Smith
Robert Pearsall Smith
Robert Pearsall Smith was a lay leader in the Holiness movement in the United States and the Higher Life movement in Great Britain. His book Holiness Through Faith is one of the foundational works of the Holiness movement...

 and Hannah Whitall Smith
Hannah Whitall Smith
Hannah Tatum Whitall Smith was a lay speaker and author in the Holiness movement in the United States and the Higher Life movement in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland...

. His father's family had become wealthy from its glass factories. He lived for a time as a boy in England, and later attended Haverford College
Haverford College
Haverford College is a private, coeducational liberal arts college located in Haverford, Pennsylvania, United States, a suburb of Philadelphia...

 and Harvard College
Harvard College
Harvard College, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, is one of two schools within Harvard University granting undergraduate degrees...

; in his 1938 autobiography he describes how in his youth he came to be a friend of Walt Whitman
Walt Whitman
Walter "Walt" Whitman was an American poet, essayist and journalist. A humanist, he was a part of the transition between transcendentalism and realism, incorporating both views in his works. Whitman is among the most influential poets in the American canon, often called the father of free verse...

 in the poet's latter years.
Quotations

The denunciation of the young is a necessary part of the hygiene of older people, and greatly assists in the circulation of their blood.

Age and Death

Don't laugh at a youth for his affectations; he is only trying on one face after another to find his own.

Age and Death

I cannot forgive my friends for dying; I do not find these vanishing acts of theirs at all amusing.

Age and Death

What music is more enchanting than the voices of young people, when you can't hear what they say?

Age and Death

The test of a vocation is the love of the drudgery it involves.

Art and Letters

It is the wretchedness of being rich that you have to live with rich people.

In the World

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 keep absolutely sober.

In the World

How many of our daydreams would darken into nightmares if there seemed any danger of their coming true!

Life and Human Nature

 
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