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Do not try to push your way through to the front ranks of your profession; do not run after distinctions and rewards; but do your utmost to find an entry into the world of beauty.

Sydney Smith
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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
As the French say, there are three sexes - men, women, and clergymen.
Sydney Smith
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.
Sydney Smith
Heaven never helps the men who will not act.
Sydney Smith
Life is to be fortified by many friendships. To love and to be loved is the greatest happiness of existence.
Sydney Smith
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.
Sydney Smith
Poverty us no disgrace to a man, but it is confoundedly inconvenient.
Sydney Smith
Madam, I have been looking for a person who disliked gravy all my life; let us swear eternal friendship.
Sydney Smith
To business that we love we rise bedtime, and go to't with delight.
Sydney Smith
What would life be without arithmetic, but a scene of horrors?
Sydney Smith
Manners are like the shadows of virtues, they are the momentary display of those qualities which our fellow creatures love and respect.
Sydney Smith
Live always in the best company when you read.
Sydney Smith
Do not try to push your way through to the front ranks of your profession; do not run after distinctions and rewards; but do your utmost to find an entry into the world of beauty.
Sydney Smith
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.
Sydney Smith
Correspondences are like small clothes before the invention of suspenders; it is impossible to keep them up.
Sydney Smith
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.
Sydney Smith
It is the greatest of all mistakes to do nothing because you can only do little - do what you can.
Sydney Smith
Solitude cherishes great virtues and destroys little ones.
Sydney Smith
It is safest to be moderately base - to be flexible in shame, and to be always ready for what is generous, good, and just, when anything is to be gained by virtue.
Sydney Smith
A great deal of talent is lost to the world for want of a little courage. Every day sends to their graves obscure men whose timidity prevented them from making a first effort.
Sydney Smith
What a pity it is that we have no amusements in England but vice and religion!
Sydney Smith
Let the Dean and Canons lay their heads together and the thing will be done.
Sydney Smith
What you don't know would make a great book.
Sydney Smith
Whatever you are by nature, keep to it; never desert your line of talent. Be what nature intended you for, and you will succeed.
Sydney Smith
Science is his forte, and omniscience his foible.
Sydney Smith
I have, alas, only one illusion left, and that is the Archbishop of Canterbury.
Sydney Smith
I never read a book before previewing it; it prejudices a man so.
Sydney Smith
Have the courage to be ignorant of a great number of things, in order to avoid the calamity of being ignorant of everything.
Sydney Smith
I look upon Switzerland as an inferior sort of Scotland.
Sydney Smith
Never give way to melancholy; resist it steadily, for the habit will encroach.
Sydney Smith
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.
Sydney Smith
Find fault when you must find fault in private, and if possible sometime after the offense, rather than at the time.
Sydney Smith
Never talk for half a minute without pausing and giving others a chance to join in.
Sydney Smith
A comfortable house is a great source of happiness. It ranks immediately after health and a good conscience.
Sydney Smith
The thing about performance, even if it's only an illusion, is that it is a celebration of the fact that we do contain within ourselves infinite possibilities.
Sydney Smith
Among the smaller duties of life I hardly know any one more important than that of not praising where praise is not due.
Sydney Smith
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
No man can ever end with being superior who will not begin with being inferior.
Sydney Smith
Great men hallow a whole people, and lift up all who live in their time.
Sydney Smith
Mankind are always happier for having been happy so that if you make them happy now you make them happy twenty years hence by the memory of it.
Sydney Smith
Brevity in writing is what charity is to all other virtues righteousness is nothing without the one nor authorship without the other.
Sydney Smith
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
It is all nonsense about not being able to work without ale and gin and cider and fermented liquors. Do lions and cart horses drink ale
Sydney Smith
Obstacles are those frightful things you see when you take your eyes off your goals.
Sydney Smith
We know nothing of tomorrow our business is to be good and happy today.
Sydney Smith
We know nothing of tomorrow; our business is to be good and happy today.
Sydney Smith
Marriage resembles a pair of shears, so joined that they cannot be separated; often moving in opposite directions, yet always punishing any one who comes between them.
Sydney Smith
If I were to begin life again, I would devote it to music. It is the only cheap and unpunished rapture upon earth.
Sydney Smith