Love Quote by Sydney Smith

The line is a sly rebuke dressed up as cheerfulness: when work actually fits the soul, the usual bargain we strike with the day (drag yourself up, reward yourself later) collapses. Smith flips the familiar moralizing about diligence into something more seductive. Discipline isn’t the point; desire is. You don’t rise early because you are virtuous. You rise because you can’t wait.

The phrasing does a lot of covert work. “To business” gives the sentiment Protestant backbone - a nod to duty, schedule, and the respectable language of productivity. Then Smith detonates it with “that we love.” Love is the contraband smuggled into the countinghouse. The archaic snap of “go to’t” makes the motion feel immediate and bodily, less like a career plan than an instinct. “With delight” lands as an almost suspicious word in a culture that often treats pleasure as a moral hazard.

Context matters: Smith was a clergyman and a public moral voice in an England where seriousness was a social currency and idleness was treated as sin with a hangover. His best writing often needles hypocrisy with a light touch. Here he’s offering a gentler theology: the good life isn’t only self-denial; it can look like appetite harnessed to purpose.

Subtext: if you’re not rising “bedtime” with delight, the problem may not be your character. It may be the work. That’s a radical suggestion from a man paid to talk about duty.