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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.

Sydney Smith

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Sydney Smith
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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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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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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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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.
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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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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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A comfortable house is a great source of happiness. It ranks immediately after health and a good conscience.
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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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If you want to improve your understanding, drink coffee.
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I always fear that creation will expire before teatime.
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Hope is the belief, more or less strong, that joy will come.
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Oh, don't tell me of facts, I never believe facts you know, [George] Canning said nothing was so fallacious as facts, except figures.
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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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Some men have only one book in them, others a library.
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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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Great men hallow a whole people, and lift up all who live in their time.
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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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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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Never give way to melancholy resist it steadily, for the habit will encroach.
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A great deal of talent is lost to the world for want of a little courage.
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