Oliver Goldsmith Quotes
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Politics resemble religion; attempting to divest either of ceremony is the most certain mode of bringing either into contempt.
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Cheerful at morn, he wakes from short repose,Breasts the keen air, and carols as he goes.
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And what is friendship but a name,A charm that lulls to sleep,A shade that follows wealth or fame,And leaves the wretch to weep?
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The dog, to gain some private ends,Went mad, and bit the man.
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Our chief comforts often produce our greatest anxieties, and the increase in our possessions is but an inlet to new disquietudes.
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One writer, for instance, excels at a plan or a title page, another works away at the body of the book, and a third is a dab at an index.
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A flattering painter, who made it his careTo draw men as they ought to be, not as they are.
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Bends to the grave with unperceived decay,While resignation gently slopes the way;And, all his prospects brightening to the last,His heaven commences ere the world be past.
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That strain once more; it bids remembrance rise.
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The only art her guilt to cover,To hide her shame from every eye,To give repentance to her lover,And wring his bosom, is — to die.
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The first blow is half the battle.
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They would talk of nothing but high life, and high-lived company, with other fashionable topics, such as pictures, taste, Shakespeare, and the musical glasses.
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The genteel thing is the genteel thing any time, if as be that a gentleman bees in a concatenation accordingly.
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A book may be very amusing with numerous errors, or it may be very dull without a single absurdity.
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We sometimes had those little rubs which Providence sends to enhance the value of its favors.
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Life has been compared to a race, but the allusion improves by observing, that the most swift are usually the least manageable and the most likely to stray from the course. Great abilities have always been less serviceable to the possessors than moderate ones.
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The Europeans are themselves blind who describe fortune without sight. No first-rate beauty ever had finer eyes, or saw more clearly. They who have no other trade but seeking their fortune need never hope to find her; coquette-like, she flies from her close pursuers, and at last fixes on the plodding mechanic who stays at home and minds his business.
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She who makes her husband and her children happy, who reclaims the one from vice, and trains up the other to virtue, is a much greater character than the ladies described in romance, whose whole occupation is to murder mankind with shafts from their quiver or their eyes.
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This same philosophy is a good horse in the stable, but an arrant jade on a journey.
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All his faults are such that one loves him still the better for them.
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Pride in their port, defiance in their eye,I see the lords of humankind pass by.
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To the last moment of his breathOn hope the wretch relies;And e'en the pang preceding deathBids expectation rise.
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I have found by experience that they who have spent all their lives in cities contract not only an effeminacy of habit, but of thinking.
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The first time I read an excellent book, it is to me just as if I had gained a new friend. When I read a book over I have perused before, it resembles the meeting with an old one.