Sydney Smith Quotes

No furniture is so charming as books.

Nobody made a greater mistake than he who did nothing because he could do only a little.

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

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

If you want to improve your understanding, drink coffee.

Madam, I have been looking for a person who disliked gravy all my life; let us swear eternal friendship.

I never read a book before reviewing it: it prejudices a man so.

The fact is that in order to do anything 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.

we know nothing of tomorrow, our business is to be good and happy today

When you rise in the morning, form a resolution to make the day a happy one for a fellow creature.

A man who wishes to make his way in life could do no better than go through the world with a boiling tea-kettle in his hand.

I always fear that creation will expire before teatime.

People who love only once in their lives are shallow people. What they call their loyalty, and their fidelity, I call either the lethargy of custom, or their lack of imagination

As you sit on the hillside, or lie prone under the trees of the forest, or sprawl wet-legged by a mountain stream, the great door, that does not look like a door, opens.

The main question to a novel is -- did it amuse? were you surprised at dinner coming so soon? did you mistake eleven for ten? were you too late to dress? and did you sit up beyond the usual hour? If a novel produces these effects, it is good; if it does not -- story, language, love, scandal itself cannot save it. It is only meant to please; and it must do that or it does nothing.

No furniture is so charming as books, even if you never open them or read a single word.

Life is to be fortified by many friendships. To love, and to be loved, is the greatest happiness of existence.

If I were to begin life again, I would devote it to music. It is the only cheap and unpunished rapture upon earth.

Have the courage to be ignorant of a great number of things, in order to avoid the calamity of being ignorant of everything.

The Reverend Sydney Smith, though a man of the cloth, caught the spirit of the age by declining to say grace. 'With the ravenous orgasm upon you, it seems impertinent to interpose a religious sentiment,' he explained. 'It is a confusion of purpose to mutter out praises from a mouth that waters.

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

Partial Quote; “A great deal of talent is lost to the world for want of a little courage”. Full Quote; “A great deal of talent is lost to the world for want of a little courage. Every day sends to their graves obscure men whose timidity prevented them from making a first effort”.

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

Mankind are always happy for having happiness. So if you make them happy now, you make them happy twenty years from now by the memory of it.

Take short views, Hope for the best, and Trust in God.

Human beings cling to their delicious tyrannies and to their exquisite nonsense, till death stares them in the face.

Live always in the best company when you read.

I am glad you like what I said of Mrs. Elizabeth Fry (prison and mental hospital reformer). She is very unpopular with the clergy; examples of living, active virtue disturb our repose and give one to distressing comparisons; we long to burn her alive.

What you don’t know would make a great book.

A great deal of talent is lost to the world for want of a little courage

Many in this world run after felicity like an absent man hunting for his hat, while all the time it is on his head or in his hand.

Jika anda membuat seseorang bahagia hari ini, Anda juga membuat dia berbahagia dua puluh tahun lagi, saat ia mengenang peristiwa itu.

With the death of what Sydney Smith described as rational religon and the proponents of what remains sending out such confusing and uncertain messages, all civilised people have to be ethicists. We must work out our own salvation with diligence based on what we believe.

Manners are the shadows of virtues; the momentary display of those qualities which our fellow-creatures love and respect. If we strive to become, then, what we strive to appear, manners may often be rendered useful guides to the performance of our duties.

Never give way to melancholy: nothing encroaches more; I fight against it vigorously. One great remedy is, to take short views of life. Are you happy now? Are you likely to remain so till this evening? or next week? or next year? Then why destroy present happiness by a distant misery, which may never come at all, or you may never live to see it? For every substantial grief has twenty shadows, and most of them shadows of your own making.

Whatever you are by nature, keep to it; never desert your line of talent. Be what nature intended you for and you will succeed.

Whatever you are by nature, keep to it; never desert your line of talent. Be what nature intended you for, and you will succeed.

Try to make at least one person happy every day, and then in ten years you may have made three thousand, six hundred and fifty people happy or brightened a small town.”   Sydney Smith

...Nature becomes your teacher, and from her you will learn what is beautiful and who you are and what is your special quest in life and whither you should go...You live on manna vouchsafed to you daily, miraculously. You stretch out arms for hidden gifts, you year toward the moonbeams and the stars, you listen with new ears to bird's songs and the murmurs of trees and streams....From day to day you keep your log, your day-book of the soul, and you may think at first that it is a mere record of travel and of facts; but something else will be entering into it, poetry, the new poetry of your life, and it will be evident to a seeing eye that you are gradually becoming an artist in life, you are learning the gentle art of tramping, and it is giving you an artist's joy in creation.

She looks out the window and notices the sections of Cleveland Street gone to rot, the filigreed metal balconies of the shambling terraces like rusted lacework, the grimy tiled pub facades, the windows of the Lebanese restaurants filmed with grease. This is old Sydney, her father’s town of grit and mildew. The

Among the smaller duties of life I hardly know any one more important than that of not praising where praise is not due.

Do not try to push your way through to the front ranks of your profession; do not run after distinctions and rewards; but do your utmost to find an entry into the world of beauty.

From the time when Scots ceased to be the official language of government, since King's Scots had become King's English, the lack of a central authority to promote a standard had meant the growth of a bastard Anglo-Scots as the general lingo of society.

Your fathers have lived, died, and have done their work, and have done much of it well. You live and must die, and you must do your work. You have no right to enjoy a child’s share in the labor of your fathers, unless your children are to be blest by your labors. You have no right to wear out and waste the hard-earned fame of your fathers to cover your indolence. Sydney Smith tells us that men seldom eulogize the wisdom and virtues of their fathers, but to excuse some folly or wickedness of their own.

Lord Salisbury’s basic educational philosophy was that higher authority could, at best, have only a marginal effect; real desire to learn had to come from within. “N. has been very hard put to it for something to do,” he wrote of a son who had been left alone with him for a few days at Hatfield. “Having tried all the weapons in the gun-cupboard in succession—some in the riding room and some, he tells me, in his own room—and having failed to blow his fingers off, he has been driven to reading Sydney Smith’s Essays and studying Hogarth’s pictures.” Lady Salisbury did not share her husband’s detached approach. “He may be able to govern the country,” she said, “but he is quite unfit to be left in charge of his children.

When MacDiarmid spoke of "Synthetic Scots" he merely referred to another aspect of this necessary revolution; that we should forget the whole poverty-stricken "dialect" tradition that Burns and his immediate predecessors had been unconsciously responsible for, and use again all the rich resources of the language as Dunbar and the Makars had used it, as had Burns and Fergusson, Scott, Galt, Stevenson and George Douglas Brown.

Going to marry her? Impossible! You mean a part of her; he could not marry her all himself. It would be a case, not of bigamy but trigamy; there is enough of her to furnish wives for the whole parish. One man marry her! - it is monstrous! You might people a colony with her; or give an assembly with her; or perhaps take your morning's walk round her, always provided there were frequent resting places, and you were in rude health. I once was rash enough to try walking round her before breakfast, but only got half way and gave it up exhausted. Or you might read the Riot Act and disperse her; in short, you might do anything but marry her!

Warr be-rong orah Where is a better country Governor Arthur Phillip et al Vocabulary of the language of N.S. Wales in the neighbourhood of Sydney, MS 41645, SOAS, University of London

[…] Under such auspices, in 1835, he went to Canaan Academy, at Canaan, New Hampshire, Rev. William Scales, principal; he was kindly received into the family of George Kimball, Esq. There he first met Miss Julia Williams, formerly a pupil of Miss Prudence Crandall, Canterbury, Connecticut, who was imprisoned for teaching colored girls; Miss Williams subsequently became his wife. Among the pupils at the Academy were his old schoolmates, Alexander Crummell and Thomas S. Sydney. They joyfully entered upon their studies, penetrated with the hopes of a race to whom the higher branches of human learning had hitherto been a sealed book. But the spirit of caste, which we have already spoken of, as being, in the rural districts, still stronger against the education of colored youth than in the cities, soon concentrated its malign influence upon this Academy. In August of the same year (1835) a mob assembled in Canaan, and with the aid of ninety-five yoke of oxen and two days’ hard labor, finally succeeded in removing the Academy from its site and afterwards they destroyed it by fire. The same mob surrounded the house of Mr Kimball and fired shot into the room occupied by Garnet: to add to the mean atrocity of the act, he was at that time, in consequence of increasing lameness, obliged to use a crutch in walking, and was confined to his room by a fever. But neither sickness, nor infirmity, nor the howling of the mob could subdue his fiery spirit; he spent most of the day in casting bullets in anticipation of the attack, and when the mob finally came he replied to their fire with a double-barrelled shot-gun, blazing from his window, and soon drove the cowards away. Henry Highland Garnet, A memorial discourse; delivered in the hall of the House of Representatives, Washington City, D.C. on Sabbath, February 12, 1865. With an introduction by James McCune Smith, M.D. (Philadelphia: Joseph M. Wilson, 1865), pp 29-30 [The quote is from Smith's biographical sketch of Garnet]

The typical Scottish writer of the nineteenth century went down to London with great talents, sometimes even genius, attempted for a short time to work in the English tradition for an English public and then, having drifted through hack journalism, either starved to death in a garret or took his own life.

A life of knowledge is not often a life of injury and crime.

But now persecution is good, because it exists; every law which originated in ignorance and malice, and gratifies the passions from whence it sprang, we call the wisdom of our ancestors: when such laws are repealed, they will be cruelty and madness; till they are repealed, they are policy and caution.

Married couples resemble a pair of scissors, often moving in opposite directions, yet punishing anyone who gets in between them

The dearest things in the world are our neighbor's eyes; they cost everybody more than anything else in housekeeping.

A bigot delights in public ridicule, for he begins to think he is a martyr. – Sydney Smith

A great deal of talent is lost to the world for want of a little courage. Every day sends to their graves obscure men whose timidity prevented them from making a first effort.

ethicist.” “Oh, but you are, Commander. With the death of what Sydney Smith described as rational religion and the proponents of what remains sending out such confusing and uncertain messages, all civilised people have to be ethicists.

BOOKS/AUTHORS ON THE BACKS OF LIBRARY CARDS #1 Miguel Fernandez Incident at Hawk’s Hill by Allan W. Eckert/ No, David! by David Shannon #2 Akimi Hughes One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish by Dr. Seuss/Nine Stories by J. D. Salinger #3 Andrew Peckleman Six Days of the Condor by James Grady/ Eight Cousins by Louisa May Alcott #4 Bridgette Wadge Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing by Judy Blume/ Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone by J. K. Rowling #5 Sierra Russell The Egypt Game by Zilpha Keatley Snyder/ The Westing Game by Ellen Raskin #6 Yasmeen Smith-Snyder Around the World in Eighty Days by Jules Verne/The Yak Who Yelled Yuck by Carol Pugliano-Martin #7 Sean Keegan Olivia by Ian Falconer/Unreal! by Paul Jennings #8 Haley Daley Turtle in Paradise by Jennifer L. Holm/ A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle #9 Rose Vermette All-of-a-Kind Family by Sydney Taylor/ Scat by Carl Hiaasen #10 Kayla Corson Anna to the Infinite Power by Mildred Ames/Where the Sidewalk Ends by Shel Silverstein #11 UNKNOWN/CHARLES CHILTINGTON #12 Kyle Keeley I Love You, Stinky Face by Lisa McCourt/ The Napping House by Audrey

We have taxes upon every article that enters into the mouth, or covers the back, or is placed under the foot; taxes upon everything which it is pleasant to feel, smell, or taste; taxes on everything in the earth, or in the waters under the earth; on everything that comes from abroad or that is grown at home ; taxes on the raw material; taxes on every value that is added to it by the industry of man ; taxes on the sauce which pampers man's appetite, and on the drug which restores him to health ; on the ermine which covers the judge, and the rope that hangs the criminal; on the poor man's salt, and the rich man's spice; on the brass nails of the coffin, and the ribbons of the bride; — on bed and board — couchant or levant — we must pay. The schoolboy whips his taxed top; the beardless youth manages a taxed horse, with a taxed bridle, on a taxed road; and the dying Englishman, pouring his medicine, which has paid seven per cent, into a spoon which has paid fifteen per cent, flings himself back upon his chintz bed, which has paid twenty-two per cent, and expires in the arms of an apothecary who has paid a license of one hundred pounds for the privilege of presiding at his death-bed. His whole property is then taxed from two to twenty per cent. Besides the probate, large fees are demanded for burying him in the chancel ; his virtues are handed down to posterity on taxed marble, and he is gathered to his fathers to be taxed no more.

Fiction is life with the dull bits cut out.

You should never trust anyone who listens to Mahler before they're forty.

Una grande quantità di talento è persa per il mondo per la mancanza di un po' di coraggio.

All musical people seem to be happy. It is the engrossing pursuit, — almost the only innocent and unpunished passion.

Brevity in writing is what charity is to all other virtues — righteousness is nothing without the one, nor authorship without the other.

For tramping is the grammar of living. Few people learn the grammar - but it is worth while.

uric acid accumulates in the circulation (hyperuricemia) to the point that it falls out of solution, as a chemist would put it, and crystallizes into needle-sharp urate crystals. These crystals then lodge in the soft tissues and in the joints of the extremities—classically, the big toe—and cause inflammation, swelling, and an excruciating pain that was described memorably by the eighteenth-century bon vivant Sydney Smith as akin to walking on one’s eyeballs.

Perhaps human beings are incapable of living without experiencing the blue-tinged taste of loss, failure, and regret. If incidents of remorse, shame, and guilt are unavoidable, perhaps the most we can hope for is to suffer from the type of regrets that hurt least. Sydney Smith (1771-1845), an English wit, writer and Anglican cleric said, ‘Regret for the things we did can be tempered by time; it is regret for the things we did not do that is inconsolable.

A great deal of talent is lost to the world for want of a little courage.

But I know you. You will be alright.

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

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