QUOTATIONS FROM SYDNEY SMITH
‘Don’t expect too much from human life – a sorry business at the best.’
‘One of the greatest pleasures in life is conversation.’ ‘Life is to be fortified by many friendships. To love and be loved is the greatest happiness of existence.’ ‘… let other nations scramble for freedom as they can, without making ourselves the liberty-mongers of all Europe; a very seductive trade, but too ruinous and expensive.’ ‘Obstacles are those frightful things you see when you take your eyes off your goals.’ ‘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.’ ‘The church is the great lost and found department.’ ‘Find fault, when you must find fault, in private, and if possible sometime after the offence, rather than at the time.’ ‘My writing is as if a swarm of ants, escaping from an ink bottle, had walked over a sheet of paper without wiping their legs.’ ‘You have risen by your gravity. And I have sunk by my levity.’ |
‘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.’
‘Thank God for tea! What would the world do without tea?’ ‘Pleasure is very reflective, and if you give it you will feel it.’ ‘An infinite quantity of talent is annually destroyed in the Universities of England.’ ‘Have the courage to be ignorant of a great number of things, in order to avoid the calamity of being ignorant of everything.’ ‘A great deal of talent is lost to the world for want of a little courage.’ ‘My living in Yorkshire was so far out of the way, that it was actually twelve miles from a lemon.’ ‘What would you attempt to do if you knew you would not fail.’ 'The observances of the church concerning feasts and fasts are tolerably well-kept, since the rich keep the feasts and the poor keep the fasts.' 'The best way of answering a bad argument is not to stop it but to let it go on.' |
QUOTATIONS ABOUT SYDNEY SMITH IN THE MEDIA
‘He is a clergyman, but his writings have less of the gravity of the divine than of the acuteness of the man of the world.’ Illustrated London News, November 1843.
Smiths’s era ‘was a time of professional wits … and all acknowledged Smith as their master.’ Paul Johnson, The Spectator, April 1996. |
‘I want to tell you about my hero. … His unmemorable name was Rev. Sydney Smith.’ Matthew Engel, Financial Times Magazine, March 2008.
‘If you are not familiar with Sydney Smith, I recommend that you make his acquaintance’. Emma Duncan, The Times, July 2018. |
Memorial PlaqueS
Kensal Green Cemetery, Sydney Smith’s Gravestone
‘To perpetuate, While Language and Marble Still Remain, The Name and Character of THE REV. SYDNEY SMITH One of the Best of Men, His Talents, though Admitted by his Contempories To be Great Were Surpassed by his Unostentatious Benevolence, His Fearless Love of Truth and His Endeavour to Promote the Happiness of Mankind By Religious Toleration and Rational Freedom. He was born the 3rd June 1771. He became Canon Residentiary of St Paul’s Cathedral 1831. He died February 22nd 1845.
Bristol Cathedral
‘To the glory of God and to the happy memory of the Reverend Sydney Smith MA, a Canon of this Cathedral Church 1828-1831, this tablet was erected and inscribed by members of The Anchor Society in the City of Bristol 1909, as a tardy recognition of one who reasoned liberally, illuminating civic wisdom with Christian charity, political judgment with social wit and common sense with uncommon insight.’
Commemorative Plaques are also placed in the churches of Foston, Combe Florey and Woodford, Essex; in Doughty Street, London, and in York University at Heslington.
‘To perpetuate, While Language and Marble Still Remain, The Name and Character of THE REV. SYDNEY SMITH One of the Best of Men, His Talents, though Admitted by his Contempories To be Great Were Surpassed by his Unostentatious Benevolence, His Fearless Love of Truth and His Endeavour to Promote the Happiness of Mankind By Religious Toleration and Rational Freedom. He was born the 3rd June 1771. He became Canon Residentiary of St Paul’s Cathedral 1831. He died February 22nd 1845.
Bristol Cathedral
‘To the glory of God and to the happy memory of the Reverend Sydney Smith MA, a Canon of this Cathedral Church 1828-1831, this tablet was erected and inscribed by members of The Anchor Society in the City of Bristol 1909, as a tardy recognition of one who reasoned liberally, illuminating civic wisdom with Christian charity, political judgment with social wit and common sense with uncommon insight.’
Commemorative Plaques are also placed in the churches of Foston, Combe Florey and Woodford, Essex; in Doughty Street, London, and in York University at Heslington.