“A French woman is a perfect architect in dress: she never, with Gothic ignorance, mixes the orders; she never tricks out a snobby Doric shape with Corinthian finery; or, to speak without metaphor, she conforms to general fashion only when it happens not to be repugnant to private beauty.”
Quote by Oliver Goldsmith
“Processions, cavalcades, and all that fund of gay frippery, furnished out by tailors, barbers, and tire-women, mechanically influence the mind into veneration; an emperor in his nightcap would not meet with half the respect of an emperor with a crown.”
Source: Miscellaneous Works: To which is Prefixed Some Account of His Life and Writings
“The person whose clothes are extremely fine I am too apt to consider as not being possessed of any superiority of fortune, but resembling those Indians who are found to wear all the gold they have in the world in a bob at the nose.”
Source: The works of Oliver Goldsmith. 2: Enquiry into the present state of polite learning; The citizen of the world
“As boys should be educated with temperance, so the first greatest lesson that should be taught them is to admire frugality. It is by the exercise of this virtue alone they can ever expect to be useful members of society.”
Source: The Works of Oliver Goldsmith: The bee. Essays. Unacknowledged essays. Prefaces, introductions, etc
“It world be well had we more misers than we have among us.”
Source: Letters from a citizen of the world (concluded). The Bee, a select collection of essays, on the most interesting and entertaining subjects
“What we say of a thing that has just come in fashion
And that which we do with the dead,
Is the name of the honestest man in the nation:
What more of a man can be said?”
Source: The Works of Oliver Goldsmith
“Popular glory is a perfect coquette; her lovers must toil, feel every inquietude, indulge every caprice, and perhaps at last be jilted into the bargain. True glory, on the other hand, resembles a woman of sense; her admirers must play no tricks. They feel no great anxiety, for they are sure in the end of being rewarded in proportion to their merit.”
Source: The Works of Oliver Goldsmith: Comprising His Poems, Comedies, Essays, and Vicar of Wakefield
“Were I to be angry at men being fools, I could here find ample room for declamation; but, alas! I have been a fool myself; and why should I be angry with them for being something so natural to every child of humanity?”
Source: His Works
“Alas! the joys that fortune brings
Are trifling, and decay,
And those who prize the trifling things,
More trifling still than they.”
Source: Goldsmith's miscellaneous works
“It has been remarked that almost every character which has excited either attention or pity has owed part of its success to merit, and part to a happy concurrence of circumstances in its favor. Had Caesar or Cromwell exchanged countries, the one might have been a sergeant and the other an exciseman.”
Source: Essays and poems, by Dr. Oliver Goldsmith. To which are prefixed, memoirs of the author
“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.”
Source: Miscellaneous Works: To which is Prefixed Some Account of His Life and Writings
