Sydney Smith famous quotes

03-26-2025

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

#Inspirational #Motivational #Success
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.
-- Sydney Smith

#Mistake #Writing #Dresses
Life is to be fortified by many friendships. To love and to be loved is the greatest happiness of existence.
-- Sydney Smith

#Love #Friendship #Happiness
The thing about performance, even if it's only an illusion, is that it is a celebration of the fact that we do contain within ourselves infinite possibilities.
-- Sydney Smith

#Acting #Facts #Celebration
If you want to improve your understanding, drink coffee.
-- Sydney Smith

#Coffee #Understanding #Want
Thank God for tea! What would the world do without tea! How did it exist? I am glad I was not born before tea.
-- Sydney Smith

#Tea #Thank God #World
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.
-- Sydney Smith

#Men #Hands #Tea
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.
-- Sydney Smith

#Confidence #Courage #Nature
I always fear that creation will expire before teatime.
-- Sydney Smith

#Tea #Creation
No furniture is so charming as books.
-- Sydney Smith

#Book #Furniture #Charming
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

#Music #Earth #Rapture
we know nothing of tomorrow, our business is to be good and happy today
-- Sydney Smith

#Happiness #Today #Tomorrow
Madam, I have been looking for a person who disliked gravy all my life; let us swear eternal friendship.
-- Sydney Smith

#Life #Friendship #Food
In composing, as a general rule, run your pen through every other word you have written; you have no idea what vigor it will give your style.
-- Sydney Smith

#Running #Writing #Ideas
A comfortable house is a great source of happiness. It ranks immediately after health and a good conscience.
-- Sydney Smith

#Happiness #Home #House
Marriage resembles a pair of shears, so joined that they cannot be separated; often moving in opposite directions, yet always punishing anyone who comes between them.
-- Sydney Smith

#Anniversary #Marriage #Moving
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
-- Sydney Smith

#Loyalty #Imagination #People
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

#Children #Men #Water
Errors, to be dangerous, must have a great deal of truth mingled with them. It is only from this alliance that they can ever obtain an extensive circulation.
-- Sydney Smith

#Mistake #Errors #Alliances
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.
-- Sydney Smith

#Beauty #Running #Trying
Manners are like the shadows of virtues, they are the momentary display of those qualities which our fellow creatures love and respect.
-- Sydney Smith

#Love #Respect #Quality
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

#Important #Praise #Duty
Find fault when you must find fault in private, and if possible sometime after the offense, rather than at the time.
-- Sydney Smith

#Faults #Offense
I look upon Switzerland as an inferior sort of Scotland.
-- Sydney Smith

#Scotland #Switzerland #Looks
Let the Dean and Canons lay their heads together and the thing will be done.
-- Sydney Smith

#Together #Done #Dean
Never give way to melancholy; resist it steadily, for the habit will encroach.
-- Sydney Smith

#Giving #Way #Melancholy
What would life be without arithmetic, but a scene of horrors?
-- Sydney Smith

#Life #Math #Culture
When I hear any man talk of an unalterable law, the only effect it produces on me is to convince me that he is an unalterable fool
-- Sydney Smith

#Religious #Men #Law

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