Quotes by Sydney Smith

• 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 want of a little courage. Every day sends to their graves obscure men whose timidity prevented them from making a first effort.
• Have the courage to be ignorant of a great number of things, in order to avoid the calamity of being ignorant of everything.
• I look upon Switzerland as an inferior sort of Scotland.
• I have, alas, only one illusion left, and that is the Archbishop of Canterbury.
• Heaven never helps the men who will not act.
• I never read a book before previewing it; it prejudices a man so.
• Find fault when you must find fault in private, and if possible sometime after the offense, rather than at the time.
• 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.
• Correspondences are like small clothes before the invention of suspenders; it is impossible to keep them up.
• 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.
• Among the smaller duties of life I hardly know any one more important than that of not praising where praise is not due.
• A comfortable house is a great source of happiness. It ranks immediately after health and a good conscience.
• 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.
• Great men hallow a whole people, and lift up all who live in their time.
• As the French say, there are three sexes - men, women, and clergymen.
• Poverty us no disgrace to a man, but it is confoundedly inconvenient.
• What you don't know would make a great book.
• What would life be without arithmetic, but a scene of horrors?
• What a pity it is that we have no amusements in England but vice and religion!
• 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.
• To business that we love we rise bedtime, and go to't with delight.
• 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.
• 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.
• It is the greatest of all mistakes to do nothing because you can only do little - do what you can.
• Science is his forte, and omniscience his foible.
• No man can ever end with being superior who will not begin with being inferior.
• Madam, I have been looking for a person who disliked gravy all my life; let us swear eternal friendship.
• 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.
• Let the Dean and Canons lay their heads together and the thing will be done.
• Solitude cherishes great virtues and destroys little ones.
• Live always in the best company when you read.
• Never talk for half a minute without pausing and giving others a chance to join in.
• Manners are like the shadows of virtues, they are the momentary display of those qualities which our fellow creatures love and respect.
• 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.
• 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 give way to melancholy; resist it steadily, for the habit will encroach.
• Life is to be fortified by many friendships. To love and to be loved is the greatest happiness of existence.