Skip to content

His pencil was striking, resistless, and grand;
His manners were gentle, complying, and bland;
Still born to improve us in every part,
His pencil our faces, his manners our heart.

— Oliver Goldsmith Retaliation (1774)

Another quote →

Topics

Art

More quotes by Oliver Goldsmith

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

The Vicar of Wakefield (1766)

Certainly, in two opposite opinions, if one be perfectly reasonable, the other can't be perfectly right.

The Good-Natur'd Man (1768)

This same philosophy is a good horse in the stable, but an arrant jade on a journey.

The Good-Natur'd Man (1768)

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

The Vicar of Wakefield (1766)

The nakedness of the indigent world may be clothed from the trimmings of the vain.

The Vicar of Wakefield (1766)

All Oliver Goldsmith quotes →

You may also like

All religions, arts and sciences are branches of the same tree. All these aspirations are directed toward ennobling man's life, lifting it from the sphere of mere physical existence and leading the individual towards freedom.

Albert Einstein Moral Decay (1937)

The great artists are the ones who dare to entitle to beauty things so natural that when they're seen afterward, people say: Why did I never realize before that this too was beautiful?

André Gide The Immoralist (1902)

A genuine work of art must mean many things; the truer its art, the more things it will mean.

George MacDonald The Fantastic Imagination (1893)

Were art to redeem man, it could do so only by saving him from the seriousness of life and restoring him to an unexpected boyishness.

José Ortega y Gasset The Dehumanization of Art and Ideas about the Novel (1925)

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Oliver Goldsmith (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.