Sydney Smith Quotes

Whatever you are by nature, keep to it; never desert your line of talent. Be what nature intended you for, and you will succeed.

If you want to improve your understanding, drink coffee.

The main question to a novel is -- did it amuse? were you surprised at dinner coming so soon? did you mistake eleven for ten? were you too late to dress? and did you sit up beyond the usual hour? If a novel produces these effects, it is good; if it does not -- story, language, love, scandal itself cannot save it. It is only meant to please; and it must do that or it does nothing.

Life is to be fortified by many friendships. To love and to be loved is the greatest happiness of existence.

Madam, I have been looking for a person who disliked gravy all my life; let us swear eternal friendship.

Thank God for tea! What would the world do without tea! How did it exist? I am glad I was not born before tea.

The thing about performance, even if it's only an illusion, is that it is a celebration of the fact that we do contain within ourselves infinite possibilities.

A man who wishes to make his way in life could do no better than go through the world with a boiling tea-kettle in his hand.

You find people ready enough to do the Samaritan, without the oil and twopence.

A comfortable house is a great source of happiness. It ranks immediately after health and a good conscience.

In composing, as a general rule, run your pen through every other word you have written; you have no idea what vigor it will give your style.

A great deal of talent is lost to the world for the want of a little courage. Every day sends to their graves a number of obscure men who have only remained obscure because their timidity has prevented them from making a first effort; and who, if they could only have been induced to begin, would in all probability have gone great lengths in the career of fame.

I look upon Switzerland as an inferior sort of Scotland.

we know nothing of tomorrow, our business is to be good and happy today

Marriage resembles a pair of shears, so joined that they cannot be separated; often moving in opposite directions, yet always punishing anyone who comes between them.

If I were to begin life again, I would devote it to music. It is the only cheap and unpunished rapture upon earth.

I always fear that creation will expire before teatime.

No furniture is so charming as books.

The two women exchanged the type of glance women use when there is no knife handy.

Lucy, dear child, mind your arithmetic. You know in the first sum of yours I ever saw there was a mistake. You had carried two (as a cab is licensed to do), and you ought, dear Lucy, to have carried but one. Is this a trifle? What would life be without arithmetic, but a scene of horrors.

Poverty is no disgrace to a man, but it is confoundedly inconvenient.

Manners are the shadows of virtues; the momentary display of those qualities which our fellow creatures love, and respect.

A great deal of talent is lost to the world for want of a little courage.

He who drinks a tumbler of London water has literally in his stomach more animated beings than there are men, women, and children on the face of the globe.

Have the courage to be ignorant of a great number of things, in order to avoid the calamity of being ignorant of everything.

People who love only once in their lives are shallow people. What they call their loyalty, and their fidelity, I call either the lethargy of custom, or their lack of imagination

When you rise in the morning, form a resolution to make the day a happy one for a fellow creature.

The longer I live, the more I am convinced that the apothecary is of more importance than Seneca; and that half the unhappiness in the world proceeds from little stoppages; from a duct choked up, from food pressing in the wrong place, from a vexed duodenum, or an agitated pylorus.

What would life be without arithmetic, but a scene of horrors?

Find fault, when you must find fault, in private, if possible; and some time after the offense, rather than at the time.

Human beings cling to their delicious tyrannies and to their exquisite nonsense, till death stares them in the face.

Errors, to be dangerous, must have a great deal of truth mingled with them. It is only from this alliance that they can ever obtain an extensive circulation.

Politeness is good nature regulated by good sense.

Do not try to push your way through to the front ranks of your profession; do not run after distinctions and rewards; but do your utmost to find an entry into the world of beauty.

Among the smaller duties of life I hardly know any one more important than that of not praising where praise is not due.

Let the Dean and Canons lay their heads together and the thing will be done.

Resolve to make at least one person happy every day, and then in ten years you may have made three thousand, six hundred and fifty persons happy, or brightened a small town by your contribution to the fund of general enjoyment.

Heat, ma am! It was so dreadful here that I found there was nothing left for it but to take off my flesh and sit in my bones.

Avoid shame, but do not seek glory; nothing so expensive as glory.

How can a bishop marry? How can he flirt? The most he can say is "I will see you in the vestry after service."

Scotland: That garret of the earth - that knuckle-end of England - that land of Calvin, oatcakes, and sulfur.

He not only overflowed with learning, but stood in the slop.

When I hear any man talk of an unalterable law, the only effect it produces on me is to convince me that he is an unalterable fool

Hope is the belief, more or less strong, that joy will come.

Great men hallow a whole people, and lift up all who live in their time.

Some men have only one book in them, others a library.

His enemies might have said before that he talked rather too much; but now he has occasional flashes of silence, that make his conversation perfectly delightful.

No man can ever end with being superior who will not begin with being inferior.

What two ideas are more inseparable than beer and Britannia?

Never give way to melancholy; resist it steadily, for the habit will encroach.