Oliver Goldsmith

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

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

“…The more enormous our wealth, the more extensive our fears, all our possessions are paled up with new edicts every day, and hung round with gibbets to scare every invader.”

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

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

“The first time I read an excellent book, it is to me just as if I had gained a new friend. When I read a book over I have perused before, it resembles the meeting with an old one.”

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

“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?”

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

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

“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.”

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

“They say women and music should never be dated.”

“Ask me no questions, and I'll tell you no fibs.”

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

“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!”

“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.”

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

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

“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.”