Sydney Smith (1771–1845): English wit, writer, Anglican cleric. The library holds 85 quotes by Sydney Smith, drawn from Lady Holland’s Memoir, Recipe for Salad. P, On American Debts and other works. The 60 below are the most quoted; search the library in the maker for the rest.
Whatever you are from nature, keep to it; never desert your own line of talent. Be what nature intended you for, and you will succeed; be anything else, and you will be ten thousand times worse than nothing!
Let no mean spirit of revenge tempt you to throw off your loyalty to your country, and to prefer a vicious celebrity to obscurity crowned with piety and virtue.
Let every man be occupied, and occupied in the highest employment of which his nature is capable, and die with the consciousness that he has done his best.
I give up fly-fishing; it is a light, volatile, dissipated pursuit. But ground-bait with a good steady float that never bobs without a bite is an occupation for a bishop, and in no way interferes with sermon-making.
What I object to Scotch philosophers in general is, that they reason upon man as they would upon a divinity; they pursue truth without caring if it be useful truth.
The object of preaching is constantly to remind mankind of what mankind are constantly forgetting; not to supply the defects of human intelligence, but to fortify the feebleness of human resolutions.
Other rules vary; this is the only one you will find without exception: That in this world the salary or reward is always in the inverse ratio of the duties performed.
Errors, to be dangerous, must have a great deal of truth mingled with them;… from pure extravagance, and genuine, unmingled falsehood, the world never has sustained, and never can sustain, any mischief.
Children are excellent physiognomists and soon discover their real friends. Luttrell calls them all lunatics, and so in fact they are. What is childhood but a series of happy delusions?
God has given us wit and flavour, and brightness and laughter, and perfumes to enliven the days of man’s pilgrimage, and to charm his pained steps over the burning marl.
Why destroy present happiness by a distant misery, which may never come at all, or you may never live to see it? for every substantial grief has twenty shadows, and most of them shadows of your own making.
To take Macaulay out of literature and society and put him in the House of Commons, is like taking the chief physician out of London during a pestilence.
A true sarcasm is like a sword-stick—it appears, at first sight, to be much more innocent than it really is, till, all of a sudden, there leaps something out of it—sharp and deadly and incisive—which makes you tremble and recoil.
The avaricious love of gain, which is so feelingly deplored, appears to us a principle which, in able hands, might be guided to the most salutary purposes. The object is to encourage the love of labor, which is best encouraged by the love of money.
Learn from the earliest days to inure your principles against the perils of ridicule: you can no more exercise your reason, if you live in the constant dread of laughter, than you can enjoy your life if you are in the constant terror of death.