Quotes
Quotes - Smith
It requires a surgical operation to get a joke well into a Scotch understanding.
That knuckle-end of England,--that land of Calvin, oat-cakes, and sulphur.
No one minds what Jeffrey says:... it is not more than a week ago that I heard him speak disrespectfully of the equator.
We cultivate literature on a little oatmeal.
Truth is its [justice's] handmaid, freedom is its child, peace is its companion, safety walks in its steps, victory follows in its train; it is the brightest emanation from the Gospel; it is the attribute of God.
It is always right that a man should be able to render a reason for the faith that is within him.
Avoid shame, but do not seek glory,--nothing so expensive as glory.
Let every man be occupied, and occupied in the highest employment of which his nature is capable, and die with the consciousness that he has done his best.
Looked as if she had walked straight out of the ark.
The Smiths never had any arms, and have invariably sealed their letters with their thumbs.
Not body enough to cover his mind decently with; his intellect is improperly exposed.
He has spent all his life in letting down empty buckets into empty wells; and he is frittering away his age in trying to draw them up again.
You find people ready enough to do the Samaritan, without the oil and twopence.
Ah, you flavour everything; you are the vanilla of society.
My living in Yorkshire was so far out of the way, that it was actually twelve miles from a lemon.
As the French say, there are three sexes,--men, women, and clergymen.
To take Macaulay out of literature and society and put him in the House of Commons, is like taking the chief physician out of London during a pestilence.
Daniel Webster struck me much like a steam-engine in trousers.
"Heat, ma'am!" I said; "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."
Macaulay is like a book in breeches.... He has occasional flashes of silence, that make his conversation perfectly delightful.
Serenely full, the epicure would say,
Fate cannot harm me,--I have dined to-day.
Thank God for tea! What would the world do without tea?--how did it exist? I am glad I was not born before tea.
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.
The schoolboy whips his taxed top; the beardless youth manages his taxed horse with a taxed bridle on a taxed road; and the dying Englishman, pouring his medicine, which has paid seven per cent, into a spoon that has paid fifteen per cent, flings himself back upon his chintz bed which has paid twenty-two per cent, and expires in the arms of an apothecary who has paid a license of a hundred pounds for the privilege of putting him to death.
In the four quarters of the globe, who reads an American book, or goes to an American play, or looks at an American picture or statue?
