Sydney Smith Quotes

100 Sourced Quotes

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
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