Smith was born in Millville, New Jersey
the son of the prominent Quaker
s Robert Pearsall Smith
and Hannah Whitall Smith
. 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
and Harvard College
; in his 1938 autobiography he describes how in his youth he came to be a friend of Walt Whitman
in the poet's latter years.
The denunciation of the young is a necessary part of the hygiene of older people, and greatly assists in the circulation of their blood.
Don't laugh at a youth for his affectations; he is only trying on one face after another to find his own.
I cannot forgive my friends for dying; I do not find these vanishing acts of theirs at all amusing.
What music is more enchanting than the voices of young people, when you can't hear what they say?
The test of a vocation is the love of the drudgery it involves.
It is the wretchedness of being rich that you have to live with rich people.
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.
How many of our daydreams would darken into nightmares if there seemed any danger of their coming true!