Oliver Goldsmith Quotes
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Forc'd from their homes, a melancholy train,To traverse climes beyond the western main;Where wild Oswego spreads her swamps around,And Niagara stuns with thundering sound.
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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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The youth who follows his appetites too soon seizes the cup, before it has received its best ingredients, and by anticipating his pleasures, robs the remaining parts of life of their share, so that his eagerness only produces manhood of imbecility and an age of pain.
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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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This same philosophy is a good horse in the stable, but an arrant jade on a journey.
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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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The dog, to gain some private ends,Went mad, and bit the man.
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The polite of every country seem to have but one character. A gentleman of Sweden differs but little, except in trifles, from one of any other country. It is among the vulgar we are to find those distinctions which characterize a people.
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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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Pride in their port, defiance in their eye,I see the lords of humankind pass by.
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All his faults are such that one loves him still the better for them.
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I find you want me to furnish you with argument and intellects too.
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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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Cheerful at morn, he wakes from short repose,Breasts the keen air, and carols as he goes.
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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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A book may be very amusing with numerous errors, or it may be very dull without a single absurdity.
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That strain once more; it bids remembrance rise.
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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.
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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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A modest woman, dressed out in all her finery, is the most tremendous object of the whole creation.
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The first blow is half the battle.
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The twelve good rules, the royal game of goose.
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We sometimes had those little rubs which Providence sends to enhance the value of its favors.
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The genteel thing is the genteel thing any time, if as be that a gentleman bees in a concatenation accordingly.