“Every year makes me feel more thoroughly what we all recognise in…” — Sydney Dobell | V2Melody

“Every year makes me feel more thoroughly what we all recognise in theory—that there is no happiness but in being good and doing good, and that self is in all men the great obstacle to both these things.”

Connecting happiness with goodness and freedom from self-centredness · Letter to C. B. Ker, M.D., 1856

About Sydney Dobell

Sydney Dobell

5 April 1824–22 August 1874

Sydney Thompson Dobell was born on 5 April 1824 at Cranbrook in Kent, into a family whose circumstances placed him close to the commercial and dissenting middle-class culture of provincial England rather than to the aristocratic literary world. His father, Thomas Dobell, was a wine merchant, and the business of…

More by Sydney Dobell

Poems by Sydney Dobell

More remarks by Sydney Dobell

“The first condition of real success in any natural science is, that it be approached devoutly, in the attitude not of the dogmatist but of the disciple.”

Urging humility before evidence and the natural world · Notes of an Address to Medical Students, 1856

“Contemplate a thing with all your powers—intellectual and moral—at once, and find a word or phrase that is the algebraic expression of that combination of forces and you speak Poetry.”

Describing poetry as concentrated expression of the whole perceiving mind · Unpublished notes, Poetry and Art

Poetry
Truth

“So to cultivate the mind as to make it a competent reader of the best books, so to elevate the taste as to give it discernment of the rarest truths of the rarest intellects, is a business of quite another order.”

Presenting deep reading as a demanding form of intellectual cultivation · Letter to a young sister, 12 January 1858

Art
Truth