Top 79 Sydney Smith Quotes

#1. 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.

Sydney Smith

Sydney Smith Quotes #8188
#2. No furniture is so charming as books.

Sydney Smith

Sydney Smith Quotes #51801
#3. Live always in the best company when you read.

Sydney Smith

Sydney Smith Quotes #74187
#4. I never read a book before previewing it; it prejudices a man so.

Sydney Smith

Sydney Smith Quotes #129135
#5. A comfortable house is a great source of happiness. It ranks immediately after health and a good conscience.

Sydney Smith

Sydney Smith Quotes #151994
#6. Scotland: That garret of the earth - that knuckle-end of England - that land of Calvin, oatcakes, and sulfur.

Sydney Smith

Sydney Smith Quotes #153694
#7. Manners are like the shadows of virtues, they are the momentary display of those qualities which our fellow creatures love and respect.

Sydney Smith

Sydney Smith Quotes #166446
#8. 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.

Sydney Smith

Sydney Smith Quotes #231795
#9. Manners are the shadows of virtues; the momentary display of those qualities which our fellow-creatures love and respect. If we strive to become, then, what we strive to appear, manners may often be rendered useful guides to the performance of our duties.

Sydney Smith

Sydney Smith Quotes #245299
#10. 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

Sydney Smith

Sydney Smith Quotes #265811
#11. How can a bishop marry? How can he flirt? The most he can say is "I will see you in the vestry after service."

Sydney Smith

Sydney Smith Quotes #272870
#12. Hope is the belief, more or less strong, that joy will come.

Sydney Smith

Sydney Smith Quotes #295029
#13. Never give way to melancholy; resist it steadily, for the habit will encroach.

Sydney Smith

Sydney Smith Quotes #307929
#14. 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.

Sydney Smith

Sydney Smith Quotes #347508
#15. Never talk for half a minute without pausing and giving others a chance to join in.

Sydney Smith

Sydney Smith Quotes #360517
#16. I always fear that creation will expire before teatime.

Sydney Smith

Sydney Smith Quotes #369738
#17. 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.

Sydney Smith

Sydney Smith Quotes #421724
#18. Mankind are always happy for having happiness. So if you make them happy now, you make them happy twenty years from now by the memory of it.

Sydney Smith

Sydney Smith Quotes #482110
#19. 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.

Sydney Smith

Sydney Smith Quotes #507649
#20. Find fault when you must find fault in private, and if possible sometime after the offense, rather than at the time.

Sydney Smith

Sydney Smith Quotes #514735
#21. Human beings cling to their delicious tyrannies and to their exquisite nonsense, till death stares them in the face.

Sydney Smith

Sydney Smith Quotes #519524
#22. Science is his forte, and omniscience his foible.

Sydney Smith

Sydney Smith Quotes #551568
#23. 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.

Sydney Smith

Sydney Smith Quotes #551809
#24. I never read a book before reviewing it; it prejudices a man so.

Sydney Smith

Sydney Smith Quotes #590046
#25. Great men hallow a whole people, and lift up all who live in their time.

Sydney Smith

Sydney Smith Quotes #596679
#26. To business that we love we rise bedtime, and go to't with delight.

Sydney Smith

Sydney Smith Quotes #602461
#27. Life is to be fortified by many friendships. To love, and to be loved, is the greatest happiness of existence.

Sydney Smith

Sydney Smith Quotes #603238
#28. Let the Dean and Canons lay their heads together and the thing will be done.

Sydney Smith

Sydney Smith Quotes #629675
#29. You will find people ready enough to do the Samaritan without the oil and twopence.

Sydney Smith

Sydney Smith Quotes #639428
#30. What would life be without arithmetic, but a scene of horrors?

Sydney Smith

Sydney Smith Quotes #675364
#31. 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

Sydney Smith

Sydney Smith Quotes #702959
#32. Brevity in writing is
what charity is to all other virtues - righteousness is nothing
without the one,
nor authorship without the other.

Sydney Smith

Sydney Smith Quotes #754001
#33. Among the smaller duties of life I hardly know any one more important than that of not praising where praise is not due.

Sydney Smith

Sydney Smith Quotes #765029
#34. Married couples resemble
a pair of scissors,
often moving in opposite directions, yet punishing anyone who gets in between them

Sydney Smith

Sydney Smith Quotes #834641
#35. 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.

Sydney Smith

Sydney Smith Quotes #883856
#36. Oh, don't tell me of facts, I never believe facts; you know, [George] Canning said nothing was so fallacious as facts, except figures.

Sydney Smith

Sydney Smith Quotes #886197
#37. The dearest things in the world
are our neighbor's eyes;
they cost everybody more
than anything else in housekeeping.

Sydney Smith

Sydney Smith Quotes #896968
#38. As the French say, there are three sexes - men, women, and clergymen.

Sydney Smith

Sydney Smith Quotes #918564
#39. Take short views, hope for the best and trust in God.

Sydney Smith

Sydney Smith Quotes #942034
#40. Madam, I have been looking for a person who disliked gravy all my life; let us swear eternal friendship.

Sydney Smith

Sydney Smith Quotes #942473
#41. I look upon Switzerland as an inferior sort of Scotland.

Sydney Smith

Sydney Smith Quotes #965464
#42. No man can ever end with being superior who will not begin with being inferior.

Sydney Smith

Sydney Smith Quotes #965782
#43. When you rise in the morning, form a resolution to make the day a happy one for a fellow creature.

Sydney Smith

Sydney Smith Quotes #972397
#44. All musical people seem to be happy.
It is the engrossing pursuit, -
almost the only innocent and
unpunished passion.

Sydney Smith

Sydney Smith Quotes #1004369
#45. A life of knowledge is not often a life of injury and crime.

Sydney Smith

Sydney Smith Quotes #1016703
#46. What a pity it is that we have no amusements in England but vice and religion!

Sydney Smith

Sydney Smith Quotes #1021607
#47. Partial Quote;
"A great deal of talent is lost to the world for want of a little courage".
Full Quote;
"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".

Sydney Smith

Sydney Smith Quotes #1024904
#48. Have the courage to be ignorant of a great number of things, in order to avoid the calamity of being ignorant of everything.

Sydney Smith

Sydney Smith Quotes #1035372
#49. Politeness is good nature regulated by good sense.

Sydney Smith

Sydney Smith Quotes #1106868
#50. Thank God for tea! What would the world do without tea! How did it exist? I am glad I was not born before tea.

Sydney Smith

Sydney Smith Quotes #1117664
#51. A great deal of talent is lost to the world for want of a little courage

Sydney Smith

Sydney Smith Quotes #1177072
#52. 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.

Sydney Smith

Sydney Smith Quotes #1217347
#53. He not only overflowed with learning, but stood in the slop.

Sydney Smith

Sydney Smith Quotes #1222038
#54. Some men have only one book in them, others a library.

Sydney Smith

Sydney Smith Quotes #1229355
#55. 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.

Sydney Smith

Sydney Smith Quotes #1237841
#56. I have, alas, only one illusion left, and that is the Archbishop of Canterbury.

Sydney Smith

Sydney Smith Quotes #1287814
#57. 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.

Sydney Smith

Sydney Smith Quotes #1313252
#58. Never try to reason the prejudice out of a man. It was not reasoned into him, and cannot be reasoned out.

Sydney Smith

Sydney Smith Quotes #1313897
#59. 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.

Sydney Smith

Sydney Smith Quotes #1325858
#60. Many in this world run after felicity like an absent man hunting for his hat, while all the time it is on his head or in his hand.

Sydney Smith

Sydney Smith Quotes #1361303
#61. If I were to begin life again, I would devote it to music. It is the only cheap and unpunished rapture upon earth.

Sydney Smith

Sydney Smith Quotes #1382880
#62. 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.

Sydney Smith

Sydney Smith Quotes #1398087
#63. Avoid shame, but do not seek glory; nothing so expensive as glory.

Sydney Smith

Sydney Smith Quotes #1425756
#64. Solitude cherishes great virtues and destroys little ones.

Sydney Smith

Sydney Smith Quotes #1461176
#65. 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.

Sydney Smith

Sydney Smith Quotes #1475734
#66. Heaven never helps the men who will not act.

Sydney Smith

Sydney Smith Quotes #1476140
#67. Whatever you are by nature, keep to it; never desert your line of talent. Be what nature intended you for, and you will succeed.

Sydney Smith

Sydney Smith Quotes #1530575
#68. Poverty us no disgrace to a man, but it is confoundedly inconvenient.

Sydney Smith

Sydney Smith Quotes #1577868
#69. The two women exchanged the type of glance women use when there is no knife handy.

Sydney Smith

Sydney Smith Quotes #1590765
#70. It is the greatest of all mistakes to do nothing because you can only do little - do what you can.

Sydney Smith

Sydney Smith Quotes #1635583
#71. Correspondences are like small clothes before the invention of suspenders; it is impossible to keep them up.

Sydney Smith

Sydney Smith Quotes #1654112
#72. I am glad you like what I said of Mrs. Elizabeth Fry (prison and mental hospital reformer). She is very unpopular with the clergy; examples of living, active virtue disturb our repose and give one to distressing comparisons; we long to burn her alive.

Sydney Smith

Sydney Smith Quotes #1686378
#73. We know nothing of tomorrow, our business is to be good and happy today

Sydney Smith

Sydney Smith Quotes #1716876
#74. If you want to improve your understanding, drink coffee.

Sydney Smith

Sydney Smith Quotes #1789447
#75. 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.

Sydney Smith

Sydney Smith Quotes #1794208
#76. What you don't know would make a great book.

Sydney Smith

Sydney Smith Quotes #1839122
#77. 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.

Sydney Smith

Sydney Smith Quotes #1844320
#78. 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.

Sydney Smith

Sydney Smith Quotes #1867127
#79. What two ideas are more inseparable than beer and Britannia?

Sydney Smith

Sydney Smith Quotes #1868660

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