Sydney Smith Quotes

100 Sourced Quotes

It is the greatest of all mistakes to do nothing because you can only do a little. Do what you can.

Sydney Smith
No furniture so charming as books, even if you never open them or read a single word.

Sydney Smith
It is the 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
A great deal of talent is lost to the world for the want of a little courage. Every day sends to their graves a number of obscure men who have only remained obscure because their timidity has prevented them from making a first effort.

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

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

Sydney Smith
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
Marriage resembles a pair of shears, so joined that they can not be separated; often moving in opposite directions, yet always punishing anyone who comes between them.

Sydney Smith
On hearing a suggestion to build a wooden pavement around St Paul's:
Let the Dean and Canons lay their heads together and the thing will be done.

Sydney Smith
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
No one minds what Jeffrey says:… it is not more than a week ago that I heard him speak disrespectfully of the equator.

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

Sydney Smith
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
Take short views of human life—not further than dinner or tea.

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

Sydney Smith
If you choose to represent the various parts in life by holes upon a table, of different shapes — some circular, some triangular, some square, some oblong—and the persons acting these parts by bits of wood of similar shapes, we shall generally find that the triangular person has got into the square hole, the oblong into the triangular, and a square person has squeezed himself into the round hole.

Sydney Smith
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
The moment the very name of Ireland is mentioned, the English seem to bid adieu to common feeling, common prudence, and common sense, and to act with the barbarity of tyrants, and the fatuity of idiots.

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

Sydney Smith
He has spent all his life in letting down empty buckets into empty wells; and he is frittering away his age in trying to draw them up again.

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

Sydney Smith
What two ideas are more inseparable than Beer and Britannia?

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

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

Sydney Smith