Sydney Smith Quotes

100 Sourced Quotes

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.

Sydney Smith
My idea of heaven is eating pâté de foie gras to the sound of trumpets.

Sydney Smith
My living in Yorkshire was so far out of the way, that it was actually twelve miles from a lemon.

Sydney Smith
If you could be alarmed into the semblance of modesty, you would charm everybody; but remember my joke against you about the Moon and the Solar System;—"Damn the solar system! bad light — planets too distant — pestered with comets — feeble contriviance; — could make a better with great ease."

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

Sydney Smith
In the midst of this sublime and terrible storm [at Sidmouth], Dame Partington, who lived upon the beach, was seen at the door of her house with mop and pattens, trundling her mop, squeezing out the sea-water, and vigorously pushing away the Atlantic Ocean. The Atlantic was roused; Mrs. Partington's spirit was up. But I need not tell you that the contest was unequal; the Atlantic Ocean beat Mrs. Partington.

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
"Heat, ma'am!" I said; "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
Death must be distinguished from dying, with which it is often confused.

Sydney Smith
Serenely full, the epicure would say,
Fate cannot harm me, I have dined today.

Sydney Smith
The fact is that in order to do any thing 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
A Curate—there is something which excites compassion in the very name of a Curate!!!

Sydney Smith
I never read a book before reviewing it; it prejudices a man so.

Sydney Smith
Truth is its [justice's] handmaid, freedom is its child, peace is its companion, safety walks in its steps, victory follows in its train; it is the brightest emanation from the Gospel; it is the attribute of God.

Sydney Smith
On two women yelling at one another across a street:
Those two women will never agree; they are arguing from different premises.

Sydney Smith
In the four quarters of the globe, who reads an American book? Or goes to an American play? or looks at an American picture or statue? What does the world yet owe to American physicians or surgeons? What new substances have their chemists discovered? Or what old ones have they advanced? What new constellations have been discovered by the telescopes of Americans? Who drinks out of American glasses? Or eats from American plates? Or wears American coats or gowns? or sleeps in American blankets? Finally, under which of the old tyrannical governments of Europe is every sixth man a slave, whom his fellow-creatures may buy and sell and torture?

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

Sydney Smith
Macaulay is like a book in breeches... He has occasional flashes of silence, that make his conversation perfectly delightful.

Sydney Smith
Let onion atoms lurk within the bowl
And, scarce suspected, animate the whole.

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

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

Sydney Smith
The Smiths never had any arms, and have invariably sealed their letters with their thumbs.

Sydney Smith
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.

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
In order to do anything in this world worth doing, we must not stand shivering on the bank and thinking of the cold and the danger, but jump in and scramble through as well as we can.

Sydney Smith
Daniel Webster struck me much like a steam-engine in trousers.

Sydney Smith
Brighton Pavilion looks as if St Paul's had slipped down to Brighton and pupped.

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

Sydney Smith
Poverty is no disgrace to a man, but it is confoundedly inconvenient.

Sydney Smith