The voices / 135 fragments

Sydney Smith

1769 AD — 1845 AD

Listed in the author section of Bartlett’s ninth-edition anthology, in the linked 1905 printing. Dates reflect that historical edition and may differ from modern scholarship.

Author and source reference ↗

▷ Play this voice Search within this voice ↗Place in time ↗truth faith peace justice death nature mind life

Historical source references

Lady Holland's Memoir
Recipe for Salad
Sketches of Moral Philosophy
Review of Seybert's Annals of the United States, 1820
America
Speech at Taunton, 1813
On American Debts
Benevolence · anthology attribution: Sydney Smith
Brevity · anthology attribution: Sydney Smith
Gluttony · anthology attribution: Sydney Smith
Melancholy · anthology attribution: Sydney Smith
Reading · anthology attribution: Sydney Smith
Talent · anthology attribution: Sydney Smith
Temperance · anthology attribution: Sydney Smith
Wit · anthology attribution: Sydney Smith
Printed citation: Sydney Smith
Number 1238 · printed citation: Sydney Smith
Number 1554 · printed citation: Sydney Smith
Page 78 · printed citation: Sydney Smith
Page 124 · printed citation: Sydney Smith
Page 227 · printed citation: Sydney Smith
Page 325 · printed citation: Sydney Smith (Review of “Waterton’s Travels in South America”)
Page 5 · printed citation: Sydney Smith · subject: Affectation
Page 13 · printed citation: Sydney Smith · subject: Angling
Page 40 · printed citation: Sydney Smith · subject: Children
Page 71 · printed citation: Sydney Smith · subject: Education
Page 91 · printed citation: Sydney Smith · subject: Fools
Page 109 · printed citation: Sydney Smith · subject: Grief
Page 113 · printed citation: Sydney Smith · subject: Happiness
Page 127 · printed citation: Sydney Smith · subject: Ignorance

Archive entries

01c. 1807 AD

It requires a surgical operation to get a joke well into a Scotch understanding.

Sydney Smith / quote

02c. 1807 AD

That knuckle-end of England,—that land of Calvin, oat-cakes, and sulphur.

Sydney Smith / quote

03c. 1807 AD

No one minds what Jeffrey says: . . . it is not more than a week ago that I heard him speak disrespectfully of the equator.

Sydney Smith / quote

04c. 1807 AD

We cultivate literature on a little oatmeal.

Sydney Smith / quote

05c. 1807 AD

Truth is its [justice's] handmaid, freedom is its child, peace is its companion, safety walks in its steps, victory follows in its train; it is the brightest emanation from the Gospel; it is the attribute of God.

Sydney Smith / quote

06c. 1807 AD

It is always right that a man should be able to render a reason for the faith that is within him.

Sydney Smith / quote

07c. 1807 AD

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

Sydney Smith / quote

08c. 1807 AD

Let every man be occupied, and occupied in the highest employment of which his nature is capable, and die with the consciousness that he has done his best.

Sydney Smith / quote

09c. 1807 AD

Looked as if she had walked straight out of the ark.

Sydney Smith / quote

10c. 1807 AD

The Smiths never had any arms, and have invariably sealed their letters with their thumbs.

Sydney Smith / quote

11c. 1807 AD

Not body enough to cover his mind decently with; his intellect is improperly exposed.

Sydney Smith / quote

12c. 1807 AD

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 / quote

13c. 1807 AD

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

Sydney Smith / quote

14c. 1807 AD

Ah, you flavour everything; you are the vanilla of society.

Sydney Smith / quote

15c. 1807 AD

My living in Yorkshire was so far out of the way, that it was actually twelve miles from a lemon.

Sydney Smith / quote

16c. 1807 AD

As the French say, there are three sexes,—men, women, and clergymen.

Sydney Smith / quote

17c. 1807 AD

To take Macaulay out of literature and society and put him in the House of Commons, is like taking the chief physician out of London during a pestilence.

Sydney Smith / quote

18c. 1807 AD

Daniel Webster struck me much like a steam-engine in trousers.

Sydney Smith / quote

19c. 1807 AD

"Heat, ma'am!" I said; "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."

Sydney Smith / quote

20c. 1807 AD

Macaulay is like a book in breeches. . . . He has occasional flashes of silence, that make his conversation perfectly delightful.

Sydney Smith / quote

21c. 1807 AD

Serenely full, the epicure would say, Fate cannot harm me,—I have dined to-day.

Sydney Smith / quote

22c. 1807 AD

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 / quote

23c. 1807 AD

If you choose to represent the various parts in life by holes upon a table, of different shapes,—some circular, some triangular, some square, some oblong,—and the persons acting these parts by bits of wood of similar shapes, we shall generally find that the triangular person has got into the square hole, the oblong into the triangular, and a square person has squeezed himself into the round hole. The officer and the office, the doer and the thing done, seldom fit so exactly that we can say they were almost made for each other.

Sydney Smith / quote

24c. 1807 AD

The schoolboy whips his taxed top; the beardless youth manages his 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 that 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 a hundred pounds for the privilege of putting him to death.

Sydney Smith / quote