"Live always in the best company when you read"
About this Quote
Reading, for Sydney Smith, isn’t a private hobby so much as a social choice with moral consequences. “Live always in the best company when you read” slips a whole worldview into a single domestic instruction: books are people; authors are guests; your mind is a house with an open door. The line works because it recasts literacy as companionship, which smuggles in an older, clerical concern about influence. If you wouldn’t invite a scoundrel to dinner, why let one narrate your inner life?
Smith’s era helps sharpen the edge. In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, print culture explodes: newspapers, pamphlets, popular novels, political tracts. Reading becomes mass, fast, and sometimes morally suspect. A clergyman with a reformer’s sensibility would see both promise and peril in that democratization. The sentence is a gentle attempt to govern an unruly marketplace of ideas without sounding like a censor: he doesn’t ban bad books; he elevates taste into an ethic.
There’s also a sly democratizing note hiding inside the admonition. “Best company” isn’t limited to the drawing room; it’s portable. A reader in a cramped life can sit with the sharpest minds available. Yet Smith’s phrasing keeps one eyebrow raised: “best” implies standards, gatekeepers, and the anxiety that unfiltered reading might deform character rather than enlarge it.
The subtext is aspirational and disciplinary at once: choose books the way you choose friends, because both will make you more like them.
Smith’s era helps sharpen the edge. In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, print culture explodes: newspapers, pamphlets, popular novels, political tracts. Reading becomes mass, fast, and sometimes morally suspect. A clergyman with a reformer’s sensibility would see both promise and peril in that democratization. The sentence is a gentle attempt to govern an unruly marketplace of ideas without sounding like a censor: he doesn’t ban bad books; he elevates taste into an ethic.
There’s also a sly democratizing note hiding inside the admonition. “Best company” isn’t limited to the drawing room; it’s portable. A reader in a cramped life can sit with the sharpest minds available. Yet Smith’s phrasing keeps one eyebrow raised: “best” implies standards, gatekeepers, and the anxiety that unfiltered reading might deform character rather than enlarge it.
The subtext is aspirational and disciplinary at once: choose books the way you choose friends, because both will make you more like them.
Quote Details
| Topic | Book |
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