Sydney Smith Quotes

100 Sourced Quotes

Science is his forte, and omniscience his foible.

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

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

Sydney Smith
Not body enough to cover his mind decently with; his intellect is improperly exposed.

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

Sydney Smith
I have seen nobody since I saw you, but persons in orders. My only varieties are vicars, rectors, curates, and every now and then (by way of turbot) an archdeacon.

Sydney Smith
If there is a pure and elevated pleasure in this world it is a roast pheasant with bread sauce. Barn door fowls for dissenters but for the real Churchman, the thirty-nine times articled clerk—the pheasant, the pheasant.

Sydney Smith
You remember Thurlow's answer to some one complaining of the injustice of a company. "Why, you never expected justice from a company, did you? they have neither a soul to lose, nor a body to kick."

Sydney Smith
The schoolboy whips his taxed top; the beardless youth manages his taxed horse with a taxed bridle on a taxed road; and the dying Englishman, pouring his medicine, which has paid seven per cent, into a spoon that has paid fifteen per cent, flings himself back upon his chintz bed which has paid twenty-two per cent, and expires in the arms of an apothecary who has paid a license of a hundred pounds for the privilege of putting him to death.

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
Preaching has become a byword for long and dull conversation of any kind; and whoever wishes to imply, in any piece of writing, the absence of everything agreeable and inviting, calls it a sermon.

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

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
The history of the world shows us that men are not to be counted by their numbers, but by the fire and vigour of their passions.

Sydney Smith
Lord John…would perform the operation for the stone—build St Peter's or assume—(with or without ten minutes notice) the command of the Channel Fleet; and no one would discover by his manner that the patient had died, the church tumbled down, and the Channel Fleet been knocked to atoms.
Of Lord John russell

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

Sydney Smith
As the French say, there are three sexes, — men, women, and clergymen.

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

Sydney Smith
When I hear any man talk of an unalterable law, the only effect it produces upon me is to convince me that he is an unalterable fool.

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
What you don't know would make a great book.

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
Tory and Whig in turns shall be my host,
I taste no politics in boiled and roast.

Sydney Smith
I look upon Switzerland as an inferior sort of Scotland.

Sydney Smith
Live always in the best company when you read.

Sydney Smith
I am just going to pray for you at St Paul's, but with no very lively hope of success.

Sydney Smith
He was a one-book man. Some men have only one book in them; others, a library.

Sydney Smith
It requires a surgical operation to get a joke well into a Scotch understanding.

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