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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
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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
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Great men hallow a whole people and lift up all who live in their time.
Sydney Smith
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Macaulay is like a book in breeches... He has occasional flashes of silence, that make his conversation perfectly delightful.
Sydney Smith
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Let onion atoms lurk within the bowl
And, scarce suspected, animate the whole.
Sydney Smith
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Never give way to melancholy; resist it steadily, for the habit will encroach.
Sydney Smith
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What two ideas are more inseparable than Beer and Britannia?
Sydney Smith
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The Smiths never had any arms, and have invariably sealed their letters with their thumbs.
Sydney Smith
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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
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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
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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.
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Daniel Webster struck me much like a steam-engine in trousers.
Sydney Smith
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Brighton Pavilion looks as if St Paul's had slipped down to Brighton and pupped.
Sydney Smith
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Correspondences are like small clothes before the invention of suspenders; it is impossible to keep them up.
Sydney Smith
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Poverty is no disgrace to a man, but it is confoundedly inconvenient.
Sydney Smith
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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.
Sydney Smith
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How can a bishop marry? How can he flirt? The most he can say is, 'I will see you in the vestry after service.'
Sydney Smith
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Let us see the result of good food in a strong body, and the result of great reading in a full and powerful mind.
Sydney Smith
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Men who prefer any load of infamy, however great, to any pressure of taxation, however light.
Sydney Smith
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Nothing can be more disgusting than an oratorio. How absurd to see 500 people fiddling like madmen about Israelites in the Red Sea!
Sydney Smith
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In composing, as a general rule, run your pen through every other word you have written; you have no idea what vigour it will give your style.
Sydney Smith
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Dean Swift's rule is as good for women as for men — never to talk above a half minute without pausing, and giving others an opportunity to strike in.
Sydney Smith
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One evil in old age is, that as your time is come, you think that every little illness is the beginning of the end. When a man expects to be arrested, every knock at the door is an alarm.
Sydney Smith
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Every increase of knowledge may possibly render depravity more depraved, as well as it may increase the strength of virtue. It is in itself only power; and its value depends on its application.
Sydney Smith
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Ah, you flavor everything; you are the vanilla of society.
Sydney Smith
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Quote of the day
Destiny is the invention of the cowardly, and the resigned.
Ignazio Silone
Sydney Smith
Creative Commons
Born:
June 3, 1771
Died:
February 22, 1845
(aged 73)
Bio:
Sydney Smith was an English wit, writer and Anglican cleric.
Known for:
A memoir of the Reverend Sydney Smith
Peter Plymley's letters, and selected essays
The works of the Rev. Sydney Smith (1839)
Most used words:
man
life
american
book
tea
triangular
square
person
human
hole
women
common
paid
taxed
atlantic
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