Sydney Smith Quotes

I am just going to pray for you at St Paul’s, but with no very lively hope of success.

My idea of heaven is, eating pate de foie gras to the sound of trumpets.

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

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

He has occasional flashes of silence that make his conversation perfectly delightful.

He is like a book in breeches.

I heard him [Jeffrey] speak disrespectfully of the Equator!

That knuckle-end of England – that land of Calvin, oat-cakes and sulphur.

Take short views, hope for the best, and trust in God.

He who drinks a tumbler of London Water has literally in his stomach more animated beings than there are men, Women and Children on the face of the globe.

Alas, alas, how easily a priest begets children and with what difficulty he provides for them; a priest I mean who is extravagant enough to keep a conscience; a point wherein our profession commits (I must say) little excess.

What two ideas are more inseparable than Beer and Britannia.

The moment that the very name of Ireland is mentioned, the English seem to bid adieu to common feeling, common prudence, and common sense, and to act with the barbarity of tyrants and the fatuity of idiots.