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.

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.

I look upon Switzerland as an inferior sort of Scotland.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

Politeness is good nature regulated by good sense.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

Never try to reason the prejudice out of a man. It was not reasoned into him, and cannot be reasoned out.

Solitude cherishes great virtues and destroys little ones.

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

What two ideas are more inseparable than beer and Britannia?

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

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.

Take short views, hope for the best and trust in God.

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

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

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

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

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

Oh, don't tell me of facts, I never believe facts; you know, [George] Canning said nothing was so fallacious as facts, except figures.

Never desert your own line of talent. Be what nature intended you for and you will succeed.