Daily Inspiration Quote by Sydney Smith

Melancholy isn’t treated here as a tragic destiny or a romantic badge; it’s framed as a bad habit with ambitions. Sydney Smith’s line carries the brisk, practical moral psychology of a clergyman who watched people slip, not into poetic sadness, but into the slow self-indulgence of despair. “Never give way” is physical language, as if sorrow were a crowd pressing at a door. “Resist it steadily” rejects the fantasy of catharsis: you don’t outfeel melancholy, you outlast it. The sentence sounds like counsel, but it’s also a warning about momentum. Once you start accommodating the mood, it “encroaches” - a wonderfully legal, property-dispute verb that makes melancholy an opportunist squatting on your inner life.

The intent is preventative, even disciplinary, aimed at readers who can still choose their next hour. Smith isn’t denying grief; he’s separating inevitable pain from the optional ritual of brooding. The subtext is Protestant and bourgeois: character is made in small decisions; virtue is practiced, not proclaimed. There’s also a social edge. A clergyman in late Georgian and early Victorian England was expected to be a steward of morale, preaching not only salvation but stability. Melancholy, if allowed to become a “habit,” threatens productivity, faith, and duty - an infection that spreads from private mood to public conduct.

What makes the line work is its refusal to flatter sadness. Smith gives melancholy no grandeur, only appetite. In doing so, he offers a harsh kind of hope: if it can encroach, it can also be fenced off.