Quotes by Smith Sydney
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Find fault when you must find fault in private, and if possible sometime after the offense, rather than at the time.
Life is to be fortified by many friendships. To love and to be loved is the greatest happiness of existence.
Among the smaller duties of life I hardly know any one more important than that of not praising where praise is not due.
Heaven never helps the men who will not act.
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.
Have the courage to be ignorant of a great number of things, in order to avoid the calamity of being ignorant of everything.
Let the Dean and Canons lay their heads together and the thing will be done.
Correspondences are like small clothes before the invention of suspenders; it is impossible to keep them up.
Great men hallow a whole people, and lift up all who live in their time.
It is the greatest of all mistakes to do nothing because you can only do little - do what you can.
I never read a book before previewing it; it prejudices a man so.
Whatever you are by nature, keep to it; never desert your line of talent. Be what nature intended you for, and you will succeed.
To business that we love we rise bedtime, and go to't with delight.
No man can ever end with being superior who will not begin with being inferior.
Poverty us no disgrace to a man, but it is confoundedly inconvenient.
Solitude cherishes great virtues and destroys little ones.
Live always in the best company when you read.
The object of preaching is to constantly remind mankind of what they keep forgetting; not to supply the intellect, but to fortify the feebleness of human resolutions.
Madam, I have been looking for a person who disliked gravy all my life; let us swear eternal friendship.
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.
Never give way to melancholy; resist it steadily, for the habit will encroach.
What a pity it is that we have no amusements in England but vice and religion!
It 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.
To do anything in this world worth doing, we must not stand back shivering and thinking of the cold and danger, but jump in, and scramble through as well as we can.
As the French say, there are three sexes - men, women, and clergymen.
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