Oliver Goldsmith

Honour sinks where commerce long prevails.

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.

Where wealth accumulates, men decay.

Be not affronted at a joke. If one throw salt at thee, thou wilt receive no harm, unless thou art raw.

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.

Write how you want, the critic shall show the world you could have written better.

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.

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

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

Surely the best way to meet the enemy is head on in the field and not wait till they plunder our very homes.

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

There are some faults so nearly allied to excellence that we can scarce weed out the vice without eradicating the virtue.

Our greatest glory consists not in never failing, but in rising every time we fall.

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

The hours we pass with happy prospects in view are more pleasing than those crowded with fruition.

Every absurdity has a champion to defend it.

Pity and friendship are two passions incompatible with each other.

The jests of the rich are ever successful.

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

Hope is such a bait, it covers any hook.

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.

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

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

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

As writers become more numerous, it is natural for readers to become more indolent; whence must necessarily arise a desire of attaining knowledge with the greatest possible ease.

I was ever of the opinion, that the honest man who married and brought up a large family, did more service than he who continued single, and only talked of population.

On the stage he was natural, simple, affecting, ‘Twas only when he was off, he was acting.

They say women and music should never be dated.

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?

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!

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

Tenderness is a virtue.

Girls like to be played with, and rumpled a little too, sometimes.

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

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

Could a man live by it, it were not unpleasant employment to be a poet.

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

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

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