01c. 1807 ADIt requires a surgical operation to get a joke well into a Scotch understanding.Sydney Smith / quote ↗
02c. 1807 ADThat knuckle-end of England,—that land of Calvin, oat-cakes, and sulphur.Sydney Smith / quote ↗
03c. 1807 ADNo 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 ↗
05c. 1807 ADTruth 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 ADIt is always right that a man should be able to render a reason for the faith that is within him.Sydney Smith / quote ↗
08c. 1807 ADLet 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 ↗
10c. 1807 ADThe Smiths never had any arms, and have invariably sealed their letters with their thumbs.Sydney Smith / quote ↗
11c. 1807 ADNot body enough to cover his mind decently with; his intellect is improperly exposed.Sydney Smith / quote ↗
12c. 1807 ADHe 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 ADYou find people ready enough to do the Samaritan, without the oil and twopence.Sydney Smith / quote ↗
15c. 1807 ADMy living in Yorkshire was so far out of the way, that it was actually twelve miles from a lemon.Sydney Smith / quote ↗
16c. 1807 ADAs the French say, there are three sexes,—men, women, and clergymen.Sydney Smith / quote ↗
17c. 1807 ADTo 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 ↗
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 ADMacaulay is like a book in breeches. . . . He has occasional flashes of silence, that make his conversation perfectly delightful.Sydney Smith / quote ↗
21c. 1807 ADSerenely full, the epicure would say, Fate cannot harm me,—I have dined to-day.Sydney Smith / quote ↗
22c. 1807 ADThank 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 ADIf 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 ADThe 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 ↗
