Sydney Smith Quotations

The two women exchanged the type of glance women use when there is no knife handy.

Poverty is no disgrace to a man, but it is confoundedly inconvenient.

Great men hallow a whole people, and lift up all who live in their time.

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

Politeness is good nature regulated by good sense.

Heat, ma am! 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.

Resolve to make at least one person happy every day, and then in ten years you may have made three thousand, six hundred and fifty persons happy, or brightened a small town by your contribution to the fund of general enjoyment.

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

It is no more necessary that a man should remember the different dinners and suppers which have made him healthy, than the different books which have made him wise. Let us see the results of good food in a strong body, and the results of great reading in a full and powerful mind.

His enemies might have said before that he talked rather too much; but now he has occasional flashes of silence, that make his conversation perfectly delightful.