Sydney Smith

Never try to reason the prejudice out of a man. It wasn't reasoned into him, and it cannot be reasoned out.

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

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

Whatever you are by nature, keep to it; never desert your own line of talent. Be what nature intended you for, and you will succeed; be anything else and you will be ten thousand times worse than nothing.

Have the courage to be ignorant of a great number of things, in order to avoid the calamity of being ignorant of everything.

His enemies might have said before that he talked rather too much; but now he has occasional flashes of silence, that make his conversation perfectly delightful.

If you choose to represent the various parts in life by holes upon a table, of different shapes,-some circular, some triangular, some square, some oblong,-and the persons acting these parts by bits of wood of similar shapes, 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. The officer and the office, the doer and the thing done, seldom fit so exactly that we can say they were almost made for each other.

No one minds what Jeffrey says: . . it is not more than a week ago that I heard him speak disrespectfully of the equator.

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

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.