"Ah, you flavour everything; you are the vanilla of society."

Sydney Smith Philosophy See all quotes by Sydney Smith →

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“My idea of heaven is, eating pâté de foie gras to the sound of trumpets.”

“When I hear any man talk of an unalterable law, the only effect it produces upon me is to convince me that he is an unalterable fool.”

“I am old, but I certainly have not that sign of old age, extolling the past at the expense of the present.”

“My living in Yorkshire was so far out of the way, that it was actually twelve miles from a lemon.”

“I look upon Switzerland as an inferior sort of Scotland.”

“Bishop Berkeley destroyed this world in one volume octavo; and nothing remained after his time, but mind — which experienced a similar fate from the hand of Mr. Hume, in 1737.”

Resonant Thoughts

"It was devotion to the sea, wedded to a fire of pent-up patriotism struggling incessantly for an outlet in strenuous physical expression; a humanity, born of acute sensitiveness to his own limitations…"

— Robert Erskine Childers

Literature1870–1922

#Human Nature

"There is not only one ‘false Christ.’ There are several wellknown teachers who believe themselves, or are believed by their followers, to be the Christ, and from my personal experience alone I know sc…"

— Benjamin Creme

Art1922–2016

#Human Nature

"Policies that assume that human nature is a tabula rasa should be reviewed and revised to reflect that man has an in-built genetic code for survival with no evidence for innate morality."

— Nayef Al-Rodhan

bioethics1959

#Human Nature

"When you destroy the walls of falsehood that you have built, everything becomes one. Only when you merge with the existence, you are free. As long as you and the existence are separated there is no su…"

— Jaggi Vasudev

Music1957

#freedom