Sydney Smith: Doing

Sydney Smith was English writer and clergyman. Explore interesting quotes on doing.

Sydney Smith: 136 quotes7 likes

“Avoid shame, but do not seek glory, — nothing so expensive as glory.”

Vol. I, ch. 4
Lady Holland's Memoir (1855)

“Thank God for tea! What would the world do without tea?—how did it exist? I am glad I was not born before tea.”

Source: Recipe for Salad, p. 383
Source: A memoir of the Rev. Sydney Smith

“Regret for the things we did can be tempered by time; it is regret for the things we did not do that is inconsolable.”

“You find people ready enough to do the Samaritan, without the oil and twopence.”

Vol. I, p. 261
Lady Holland's Memoir (1855), Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

“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.”

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

“It is the greatest of all mistakes to do nothing because you can only do little.”

Lecture XIX : On the Conduct of the Understanding, Part II
Elementary Sketches of Moral Philosophy (1849)