Sydney Smith

A comfortable house is a great source of happiness. It ranks immediately after health and a good conscience.

Correspondences are like small clothes before the invention of suspenders; it is impossible to keep them up.

I have no relish for the country; it is a kind of healthy grave.

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

I look upon Switzerland as an inferior sort of Scotland.

If you could be alarmed into the semblance of modesty, you would charm everybody; but remember my joke against you about the Moon and the Solar System;—"Damn the solar system! bad light — planets too distant — pestered with comets — feeble …

We know nothing of tomorrow; our business is to be good and happy today.

I am old, but I certainly have not that sign of old age, extolling the past at the expense of the present.

Thank God for tea! What would the world do without tea? how did it exist? I am glad I was not born before tea.

In composing, as a general rule, run your pen through every other word you have written; you have no idea what vigour it will give your style.

Ah! what you don't know would make a great book.

You remember Thurlow's answer to some one complaining of the injustice of a company. "Why, you never expected justice from a company, did you? they have neither a soul to lose, nor a body to kick."

Serenely full, the epicure would say, Fate cannot harm me, I have dined today.

Let onion atoms lurk within the bowl And, scarce suspected, animate the whole.

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

He was a one-book man. Some men have only one book in them; others, a library.

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

Live always in the best company when you read.

"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."

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

Praise is the best diet for us, after all.

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.

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

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