Quote

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.

Sydney Smith

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Sydney Smith
Idea
Composing
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General
Writing
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Every
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Brevity

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A comfortable house is a great source of happiness. It ranks immediately after health and a good conscience.
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Among the smaller duties of life I hardly know any one more important than that of not praising where praise is not due.
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Do not try to push your way through to the front ranks of your profession do not run after distinctions and rewards but do your utmost to find an entry into the world of beauty.
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Heat, ma am! 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.
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Life is to be fortified by many friendships. To love and to be loved is the greatest happiness of existence.
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Never give way to melancholy resist it steadily, for the habit will encroach.
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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.
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People who love only once in their lives are shallow people. What they call their loyalty, and their fidelity, I call either the lethargy of custom, or their lack of imagination
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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.
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Some men have only one book in them, others a library.
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Great men hallow a whole people, and lift up all who live in their time.
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Lucy, dear child, mind your arithmetic. You know in the first sum of yours I ever saw there was a mistake. You had carried two (as a cab is licensed to do), and you ought, dear Lucy, to have carried but one. Is this a trifle? What would life be without arithmetic, but a scene of horrors.
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The two women exchanged the type of glance women use when there is no knife handy.
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The longer I live, the more I am convinced that the apothecary is of more importance than Seneca and that half the unhappiness in the world proceeds from little stoppages from a duct choked up, from food pressing in the wrong place, from a vexed duodenum, or an agitated pylorus.
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Human beings cling to their delicious tyrannies and to their exquisite nonsense, till death stares them in the face.
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Have the courage to be ignorant of a great number of things, in order to avoid the calamity of being ignorant of everything.
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Avoid shame, but do not seek glory nothing so expensive as glory.
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Never try to reason the prejudice out of a man. It was not reasoned into him, and cannot be reasoned out.
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Find fault, when you must find fault, in private, if possible and some time after the offense, rather than at the time.
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Take short views, hope for the best and trust in God.
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