Sydney Smith quotes:

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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.
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.
A great deal of talent is lost to the world for want of a little courage. Every day sends to their graves obscure men whose timidity prevented them from making a first effort.
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.
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.
Let the Dean and Canons lay their heads together and the thing will be done.
Scotland: That garret of the earth - that knuckle-end of England - that land of Calvin, oatcakes, and sulfur.
It is the greatest of all mistakes to do nothing because you can only do little - do what you can.
Manners are like the shadows of virtues, they are the momentary display of those qualities which our fellow creatures love and respect.
Have the courage to be ignorant of a great number of things, in order to avoid the calamity of being ignorant of everything.
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.
Never talk for half a minute without pausing and giving others a chance to join in.
What would life be without arithmetic, but a scene of horrors?
Great men hallow a whole people, and lift up all who live in their time.
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.
Oh, don't tell me of facts, I never believe facts; you know, [George] Canning said nothing was so fallacious as facts, except figures.
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
It is no more necessary that a man should remember the different dinners and suppers which have made him healthy, than the different books which have made him wise. Let us see the results of good food in a strong body, and the results of great reading in a full and powerful mind.
My living in Yorkshire was so far out of the way, that it was eleven miles away from a lemon
It is the greatest of all mistakes to do nothing because you can only do little; do something.
we know nothing of tomorrow, our business is to be good and happy today
Live always in the best company when you read.
Whatever you are by nature, keep to it; never desert your line of talent. Be what nature intended you for, and you will succeed.
To do anything in this world worth doing, we must not stand back shivering and thinking of the cold and danger, but jump in, and scramble through as well as we can.
Among the smaller duties of life I hardly know any one more important than that of not praising where praise is not due.
Some men have only one book in them, others a library.
If I were to begin life again, I would devote it to music. It is the only cheap and unpunished rapture upon earth."
Among the smaller duties of life I hardly know any one more important than that of not praising where praise is not due
The fact is that in order to do anything in this world worth doing, we must not stand shivering on the bank thinking of the cold and the danger, but jump in and scramble through as well as we can.
If I were to begin life again, I would devote it to music. It is the only cheap and unpunished rapture upon earth.
I look upon Switzerland as an inferior sort of Scotland.
Thank God for tea! What would the world do without tea! How did it exist? I am glad I was not born before tea.
I always fear that creation will expire before teatime.
It 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.
I have, alas, only one illusion left, and that is the Archbishop of Canterbury.
Bishop Berkeley destroyed this world in one volume octavo; and nothing remained, after his time, but mind; which experienced a similar fate from the hand of Mr. Hume in 1737.
Solitude cherishes great virtues and destroys little ones.
As the French say, there are three sexes - men, women, and clergymen.
It is safest to be moderately base - to be flexible in shame, and to be always ready for what is generous, good, and just, when anything is to be gained by virtue.
The object of preaching is to constantly remind mankind of what they keep forgetting; not to supply the intellect, but to fortify the feebleness of human resolutions.
Science is his forte, and omniscience his foible.
What you don't know would make a great book.
What a pity it is that we have no amusements in England but vice and religion!
[T]he 47th proposition in Euclid might now be voted down with as much ease as any proposition in politics; and therefore if Lord Hawkesbury hates the abstract truths of science as much as he hates concrete truth in human affairs, now is his time for getting rid of the multiplication table, and passing a vote of censure upon the pretensions of the hypotenuse.
A great deal of talent is lost to the world for want of a little courage.
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.
Avoid shame, but do not seek glory; nothing so expensive as glory.
Find fault when you must find fault in private, and if possible sometime after the offense, rather than at the time.
He not only overflowed with learning, but stood in the slop.
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.
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.
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.
Hope is the belief, more or less strong, that joy will come.
How can a bishop marry? How can he flirt? The most he can say is "I will see you in the vestry after service."
Human beings cling to their delicious tyrannies and to their exquisite nonsense, till death stares them in the face.
If you want to improve your understanding, drink coffee.
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.
Never give way to melancholy; resist it steadily, for the habit will encroach.
Never try to reason the prejudice out of a man. It was not reasoned into him, and cannot be reasoned out.
No furniture is so charming as books.
No man can ever end with being superior who will not begin with being inferior.
Politeness is good nature regulated by good sense.
Poverty is no disgrace to a man, but it is confoundedly inconvenient.
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.
Take short views, hope for the best and trust in God.
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.
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.
The two women exchanged the type of glance women use when there is no knife handy.
What two ideas are more inseparable than beer and Britannia?
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
When you rise in the morning, form a resolution to make the day a happy one for a fellow creature.
You will find people ready enough to do the Samaritan without the oil and twopence.

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