Oliver Goldsmith Quotes

"Life is a journey that must be traveled no matter how bad the roads and accommodations."

"Success consists of getting up just one more time than you fall."

"I love everything that's old, - old friends, old times, old manners, old books, old wine."

"You can preach a better sermon with your life than with your lips."

"The company of fools may first make us smile, but in the end we always feel melancholy."

"A great source of calamity lies in regret and anticipation; therefore a person is wise who thinks of the present alone, regardless of the past or future."

"Law grinds the poor, and rich men rule the law."

"Every absurdity has a champion to defend it."

"Hope is such a bait, it covers any hook."

"Friendship is a disinterested commerce between equals; love, an abject intercourse between tyrants and slaves."

"Man wants but little here below, nor wants that little long."

"Where wealth accumulates, men decay."

"They say women and music should never be dated."

"A man who leaves home to mend himself and others is a philosopher; but he who goes from country to country, guided by the blind impulse of curiosity, is a vagabond."

"When lovely woman stoops to folly, and finds too late that men betray, what charm can soothe her melancholy, what art can wash her guilt away?"

"Tenderness is a virtue."

"The best way to make your audience laugh is to start laughing yourself."

"Romance and novel paint beauty in colors more charming than nature, and describe a happiness that humans never taste. How deceptive and destructive are those pictures of consummate bliss!"

"If you were to make little fishes talk, they would talk like whales."

"Pity and friendship are two passions incompatible with each other."

"All that a husband or wife really wants is to be pitied a little, praised a little, and appreciated a little."

"With disadvantages enough to bring him to humility, a Scotsman is one of the proudest things alive."

"People seldom improve when they have no other model but themselves to copy."

"Honour sinks where commerce long prevails."

"Modesty seldom resides in a breast that is not enriched with nobler virtues."

"I chose my wife, as she did her wedding gown, for qualities that would wear well."

"Ceremonies are different in every country, but true politeness is everywhere the same."

"Conscience is a coward, and those faults it has not strength enough to prevent it seldom has justice enough to accuse."

"Let schoolmasters puzzle their brain, With grammar, and nonsense, and learning, Good liquor, I stoutly maintain, Gives genius a better discerning."

"The jests of the rich are ever successful."