Oliver Goldsmith
67 quotes
Biography
"The best way to make your audience laugh is to start laughing yourself."
"Hope is such a bait, it covers any hook."
"I love everything that's old, - old friends, old times, old manners, old books, old wine."
"Life is a journey that must be traveled no matter how bad the roads and accommodations."
"Friendship is a disinterested commerce between equals; love, an abject intercourse between tyrants and slaves."
"Ask me no questions, and I'll tell you no fibs."
"Pity and friendship are two passions incompatible with each other."
"I love everything that is old; old friends, old times, old manners, old books, old wines."
"Success consists of getting up just one more time than you fall."
"Men may be very learned, and yet very miserable; it is easy to be a deep geometrician, or a sublime astronomer, but very difficult to be a good man. I esteem, therefore, the traveller who instructs the heart, but despise him who only indulges the imagination. 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 only a vagabond."
"The better sort here pretend to the utmost compassion for animals of every kind. To hear them speak, a stranger would be apt to imagine they could hardly hurt the gnat that stung them: they seem so tender and so full of pity, that one would take them for the harmless friends of the whole creation; the protectors of the meanest insect or reptile that was privileged with existence. And yet, would you believe it? I have seen the very men who have thus boasted of their tenderness, at the same time devouring the flesh of six different animals toasted up in a fricassee. Strange contrariety of conduct! they pity and they eat the objects of their compassion."
"There is no arguing with Johnson: for if his pistol misses fire, he knocks you down with the butt end of it."
"[To Mr. Johnson] If you were to make little fishes talk, they would talk like whales."
"You may all go to pot."
"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."
"As writers become more numerous, it is natural for readers to become more indolent."
"That strain once more; it bids remembrance rise."
"O Memory! thou fond deceiver."
"And learn the luxury of doing good."
"Some fleeting good, that mocks me with the view."
"These little things are great to little man."
"Creation's heir, the world, the world is mine!"
"Man seems the only growth that dwindles here."
"But winter lingering chills the lap of May."
"The land of scholars and the nurse of arms."