Life is to be fortified by many friendships. To love and to be loved is the greatest happiness of existence.
Sydney Smith

Live always in the best company when you read.
Sydney Smith

Madam, I have been looking for a person who disliked gravy all my life; let us swear eternal friendship.
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

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

Never give way to melancholy; resist it steadily, for the habit will encroach.
Sydney Smith

Never talk for half a minute without pausing and giving others a chance to join in.
Sydney Smith

No man can ever end with being superior who will not begin with being inferior.
Sydney Smith

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

Science is his forte, and omniscience his foible.
Sydney Smith

Solitude cherishes great virtues and destroys little ones.
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

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

To business that we love we rise bedtime, and go to't with delight.
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

What a pity it is that we have no amusements in England but vice and religion!
Sydney Smith

What would life be without arithmetic, but a scene of horrors?
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