The Reverend Sydney Smith (1771–1845) was an English clergyman, essayist, and wit. He was one of the leading English preachers of his day and an advocate of parliamentary reform.
Smith was one of the foremost wits and essayists of the nineteenth century. He was renowned for his verbal humor and charm. He is the source of many phrases in common usage, e.g., “A square peg in a round hole” and “my idea of heaven is eating patés de foie to the sound of trumpets.”
Born in Woodford, Essex, Smith was educated at Winchester and Oxford’s New College, of which he became a Fellow. He was ordained in 1794, served at Netheravon in Wiltshire, and Edinburgh. In 1802, he started the quarterly magazine Edinburgh Review with other literary critics and journalists.
Smith lived six years in London, where he gained a reputation as a preacher, a lecturer on moral philosophy at the Royal Institution 1804–06 and a gifted speaker.
Smith is notable for his Letters of Peter Plymley (1807,) which defended Roman Catholic Emancipation. His writings also include 65 articles, collected in 1839 from the Edinburgh Review, Three Letters on the Ecclesiastical Commission (1837–39,) and review essays on political or religious subjects of the day.
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Sydney Smith
Solitude cherishes great virtues and destroys little ones.
—Sydney Smith
Topics: Solitude
Repose is agreeable to the human mind; and decision is repose. A man has made up his opinions; he does not choose to be disturbed; and he ismuch more thankful to the man who confirms him in his errors, and leaves him alone, than he is to the man who refutes him, or who instructs him at the expense of his tranquility.
—Sydney Smith
Living a good deal alone will, I believe, correct me of my faults; for a man can do without his own approbations in society, but he must make great exertions to gain it when he lives alone. Without it I am convinced solitude is not to be endured.
—Sydney Smith
Topics: Solitude
Politeness is good nature regulated by good sense.
—Sydney Smith
Topics: Politeness
You may find people ready enough to do the Samaritan without the oil and two-pence.
—Sydney Smith
Topics: Kindness
Men, whose trade is rat-catching, love to catch rats; the bug destroyer seizes on his bug with delight; and the suppressor is gratified by finding his vice.
—Sydney Smith
Topics: Abilities, Work, Talents
The dearest things in the world are our neighbor’s eyes; they cost everybody more than anything else in housekeeping.
—Sydney Smith
I have asked several men what passes in their minds when they are thinking, and I could never find any man who could think for two minutes together. Everybody has seemed to admit that it was a perpetual deviation from a particular path, and a perpetual return to it; which, imperfect as the operation is, is the only method in which we can operate with our minds to carry on any process of thought.
—Sydney Smith
Topics: Thought
Soup and fish explain half the emotions of human life
—Sydney Smith
Topics: Eating
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.
—Sydney Smith
Topics: Manners
Poverty is no disgrace to a man, but it is confoundedly inconvenient.
—Sydney Smith
Topics: Poverty
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
Topics: Law
Brevity to writing is what charity is to all other virtues; righteousness is nothing without the one, nor authorship without the other.
—Sydney Smith
Topics: Brevity
Never talk for half a minute without pausing and giving others a chance to join in.
—Sydney Smith
Topics: Conversation
Children are excellent physiognomists, and soon discover their real friends.—Luttrell calls them all lunatics, and so in fact they are.—What is childhood but a series of happy delusions?
—Sydney Smith
Topics: Children
Learn from the earliest days to insure your principles against the perils of ridicule; you can no more exercise your reason if you live in the constant dread of laughter, than you can enjoy your life if you are in the constant terror of death.
—Sydney Smith
Topics: Vision
Praise is the best diet for us, after all.
—Sydney Smith
Topics: Diet
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
Topics: Carpe-diem
That sign of old age, extolling the past at the expense of the present.
—Sydney Smith
Topics: Reflection, Old Age
It is the calling of great men, not so much to preach new truths, as to rescue from oblivion those old truths which it is our wisdom to remember and our weakness to forget.
—Sydney Smith
Topics: Memory, Truth
All musical people seem to be happy; it is to them the engrossing pursuit; almost the only innocent and unpunished passion.
—Sydney Smith
Topics: Music
Bishop Berkeley destroyed this world in one volume octavo; and nothing remained, after his time, but mind; which experienced a similar fate from the hand of Mr. Hume in 1737.
—Sydney Smith
Topics: Philosophy, Philosophers
I never read a book before reviewing it; it prejudices a man so.
—Sydney Smith
Topics: Criticism, Critics
The only way to make the mass of mankind see the beauty of justice, is by showing them, in pretty plain terms, the consequence of injustice.
—Sydney Smith
Topics: Justice
Duelling, though barbarous in civilized, is a highly civilizing institution among barbarous people; and when compared to assassination is a prodigious victory gained over human passions.
—Sydney Smith
The haunts of happiness are varied, but I have more often found her among little children, home firesides, and country houses than anywhere else.
—Sydney Smith
Topics: Happiness
Pulpit discourses have insensibly dwindled from speaking to reading; a practice of itself sufficient to stifle every germ of eloquence.
—Sydney Smith
Topics: Preaching
We are told, “Let not the sun go down in your wrath,” but I would add, never act or write till it has done so. This rule has saved me from many an act of folly. It is wonderful what a different view we take of the same event four-and-twenty hours after it has happened.
—Sydney Smith
Topics: Reflection
Dislike of innovation proceeds sometimes from the disgust excited by false humanity, canting hypocrisy, and silly enthusiasm.
—Sydney Smith
Topics: Innovation
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
Topics: Brevity
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