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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Ideas
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Giving
General
Writing
Style
Every
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Brevity

More quotes by Sydney Smith

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Human beings cling to their delicious tyrannies and to their exquisite nonsense, till death stares them in the face.
Sydney Smith
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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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No man can ever end with being superior who will not begin with being inferior.
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Take short views, hope for the best and trust in God.
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Politeness is good nature regulated by good sense.
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Never give way to melancholy resist it steadily, for the habit will encroach.
Sydney Smith
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Scotland: That garret of the earth - that knuckle-end of England - that land of Calvin, oatcakes, and sulfur.
Sydney Smith
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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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Great men hallow a whole people, and lift up all who live in their time.
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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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Thank God for tea! What would the world do without tea! How did it exist? I am glad I was not born before tea.
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Resolve to make at least one person happy every day, and then in ten years you may have made three thousand, six hundred and fifty persons happy, or brightened a small town by your contribution to the fund of general enjoyment.
Sydney Smith
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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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A great deal of talent is lost to the world for want of a little courage.
Sydney Smith
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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.
Sydney Smith
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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.
Sydney Smith
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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.
Sydney Smith
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Some men have only one book in them, others a library.
Sydney Smith
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What two ideas are more inseparable than beer and Britannia?
Sydney Smith
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I look upon Switzerland as an inferior sort of Scotland.
Sydney Smith