Sydney Smith: Trending quotes

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Sydney Smith: 136 quotes7 likes

“Take short views, hope for the best, and trust in God.”

Sydney Smith

Vol. I, ch. 6
Lady Holland's Memoir (1855)

“Ah, you flavour everything; you are the vanilla of society.”

Sydney Smith

Vol. I, ch. 9
Lady Holland's Memoir (1855)

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

Sydney Smith

Vol. I, p. 244
Lady Holland's Memoir (1855), Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

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

Sydney Smith

Source: Vol. II, letter to Catherine Crowe (31 January 1841), pp. 441–442 note: Lady Holland's Memoir (1855)

“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

Vol. I, ch. 3
Lady Holland's Memoir (1855)

“It requires a surgical operation to get a joke well into a Scotch understanding.”

Sydney Smith

Vol. I, ch. 1, p. 15
Lady Holland's Memoir (1855)

“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

Vol. I, p. 130
Lady Holland's Memoir (1855), Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

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

Sydney Smith

Vol. I, ch. 11
Lady Holland's Memoir (1855)

“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

"Catholics", published in The Edinburgh Review (1827)

“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

"The Judge That Smites Contrary to the Law: A Sermon Preached...March 28, 1824", in The Works of the Rev. Sydney Smith (1860) p. 428

“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

Vol. I, p. 265
Lady Holland's Memoir (1855), Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

“It is always right that a man should be able to render a reason for the faith that is within him.”

Sydney Smith

Vol. I, p. 53
Lady Holland's Memoir (1855), Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

“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

Lecture IX : On the Conduct of the Understanding
Elementary Sketches of Moral Philosophy (1849)

“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

Lecture IX : On the Conduct of the Understanding
Elementary Sketches of Moral Philosophy (1849)

“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

Vol. I, ch. 9
Lady Holland's Memoir (1855)

“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

Vol. I, ch. 11 http://books.google.com/books?id=R18JAAAAQAAJ&q=%22In+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%22&pg=PA382#v=onepage <br class="br">Lady Holland's Memoir (1855)

“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

Peter Plymley's Letters (1808), Letter IV

“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

Reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 6

“"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

Vol. I, p. 267
Lady Holland's Memoir (1855), Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

“Magnificent spectacle of human happiness.”

Sydney Smith

"America", published in The Edinburgh Review (July 1824)