Daily Inspiration Quote by Sydney Smith

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.