Oliver Goldsmith (1730–74) was an Anglo-Irish poet, novelist, essayist, and dramatist.
Details of Goldsmith’s birth are ambiguous. He was born the son of an Anglican clergyman, probably in Kilkenny West, County Westmeath, Ireland. He was educated at Trinity College, Dublin, before studying medicine at Edinburgh and Leyden. He practiced as a poor physician in Southwark, and was proofreader to novelist Samuel Richardson, before publishing a translation of the autobiography of the French Protestant Jean Marteilhe in 1758.
Goldsmith started and edited the weekly The Bee (1759,) and wrote essays for poet Tobias Smollett’s British Magazine. For John Newbery’s Public Ledger, he wrote the Chinese Letters (1760–71; republished as The Citizen of the World.) It was inspired by Montesquieu’s essay series Persian Letters (1721.)
The Vicar of Wakefield (1766) secured Goldsmith’s status as a novelist and The Deserted Village (1770) as a poet. Three years later, he achieved high regard as a playwright with She Stoops to Conquer (1773.)
The American writer and biographer Washington Irving wrote Life of Oliver Goldsmith (1840.)
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Oliver Goldsmith
All that a husband or wife really wants is to be pitied a little, praised a little, and appreciated a little
—Oliver Goldsmith
Topics: Husbands
We take greater pains to persuade others that we are happy, than in endeavoring to be so ourselves.
—Oliver Goldsmith
Topics: Happiness
The wisdom of the ignorant somewhat resembles the instinct of animals; it is diffused only in a very narrow sphere, but within the circle it acts with vigor, uniformity, and success.
—Oliver Goldsmith
Topics: Wisdom
For just experience tells, in every soil, That those who think must govern those who toil
—Oliver Goldsmith
Topics: Experience
The company of fools may first make us smile, but in the end we always feel melancholy.
—Oliver Goldsmith
Topics: Foolishness, Fools
Pity and friendship are two passions incompatible with each other.
—Oliver Goldsmith
Topics: Sympathy
The doctor found, when she was dead, her last disorder mortal.
—Oliver Goldsmith
Topics: Medicine, Doctors
True generosity is a duty as indispensably necessary as those imposed on us by law.—It is a rule imposed by reason, which should be the sovereign law of a rational being.
—Oliver Goldsmith
Topics: Generosity
There is nothing magnanimous in bearing misfortunes with fortitude, when the whole world is looking on…. He who, without friends to encourage or even without hope to alleviate his misfortunes, can behave with tranquility and indifference, is truly great.
—Oliver Goldsmith
Topics: Strength
He cast off his friends as a huntsman his pack, for he knew when he pleased he could whistle them back.
—Oliver Goldsmith
Topics: Popularity
Like the bee, we should make our industry our amusement.
—Oliver Goldsmith
Topics: Work, Industry
Winter, lingering, chills the lap of May.
—Oliver Goldsmith
Topics: Spring
In all the silent manliness of grief.
—Oliver Goldsmith
Topics: Grief, Grieving
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.
—Oliver Goldsmith
Topics: Cities
The jests of the rich are ever successful.
—Oliver Goldsmith
Topics: Riches, Wealth
Who can direct when all pretend to know?
—Oliver Goldsmith
Topics: Management
People seek within a short span of life to satisfy a thousand desires, each of which is insatiable.
—Oliver Goldsmith
Topics: Desire, Desires
We had no revolutions to fear, nor fatigues to undergo; all our adventures were by the fireside, and all our migrations from the blue bed to the brown.
—Oliver Goldsmith
Topics: Retirement
The unaffected of every country nearly resemble each other, and a page of Confucius and Tillotson have scarce any material difference, paltry affectation, strained allusions, and disgusting finery are easily attained by those who choose to wear them; they are but too frequently the badges of ignorance or of stupidity whenever it would endeavor to please.
—Oliver Goldsmith
Topics: Style, Affectation
The work of eradicating crimes is not by making punishment familiar, but formidable.
—Oliver Goldsmith
Topics: Punishment
His greatest riches-ignorance of wealth.
—Oliver Goldsmith
Topics: Wealth
It has been said that he who retires to solitude is either a beast or an angel; the censure is too severe, and the praise unmerited: the discontented being, who retires from society, is generally some good-natured man, who has begun his life without experience, and knew not how to gain it in his intercourse with mankind.
—Oliver Goldsmith
Topics: Solitude
Women famed for their valor, their skill in politics, or their learning, leave the duties of their own sex, in order to invade the privileges of ours. I can no more pardon a fair one for endeavoring to wield the club of Hercules, than I could a man for endeavoring to twirl her distaff.
—Oliver Goldsmith
Topics: Woman
The first blow is half the battle.
—Oliver Goldsmith
Topics: Beginning, Battle
I… chose my wife as she did her wedding-gown, not for a fine glossy surface, but such qualities as would wear well.
—Oliver Goldsmith
Topics: Wives, Weddings, Marriage
Those who place their affections at first on trifles for amusement, will find these become at last their most serious concerns.
—Oliver Goldsmith
Topics: Trifles
Don’t let us make imaginary evils, when you know we have so many real ones to encounter.
—Oliver Goldsmith
Topics: Morals, Evil, Morality
I chose my wife, as she did her wedding gown, for qualities that would wear well.
—Oliver Goldsmith
Topics: Family, Marriage, Wife
Ceremony resembles that base coin which circulates through a country by royal mandate; it serves every purposs of real money at home, but is entirely useless if carried abroad.—A person who should attempt to circulate his native trash in another country would be thought either ridiculous or culpable.
—Oliver Goldsmith
A traveler of taste will notice that the wise are polite all over the world, but the fool only at home.
—Oliver Goldsmith
Topics: Manners
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