Daily Inspiration Quote by Sydney Smith

“Science is his forte, and omniscience his foible” is a neat little booby trap of praise that snaps shut into satire. Sydney Smith - Anglican cleric, polemicist, and professional puncturer of pomposity - builds the line like a compliment and lands it like an indictment. “Forte” signals a genuine competence: this person is good at science. Then Smith yanks the ladder away. The real weakness isn’t ignorance, but the more socially seductive vice of believing one’s expertise is transferable to everything.

The wording matters. “Omniscience” isn’t just “knowing a lot”; it’s godlike knowing, the kind that turns debate into sermon and curiosity into certainty. Calling it a “foible” is the cruelly elegant twist: Smith pretends the flaw is small, even cute, while implying it’s exactly the flaw that makes the person unbearable. It’s the rhetoric of the drawing room jab - mild on the surface, lethal in aim.

Context sharpens the edge. Early 19th-century Britain is watching “science” consolidate prestige: new institutions, new methods, new public intellectuals. Smith, a clergyman comfortable with reason but allergic to arrogance, is warning that modern authority can become a new clerisy. The subtext is less anti-science than anti-priesthood-in-lab-coat: expertise as a credential for overreach.

The line still works because it nails a recurring cultural type: the specialist who treats mastery of one domain as a passport to total authority - and mistakes confidence for comprehension.