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Thou source of all my bliss, and all my woe,
That found'st me poor at first, and keep'st me so.

— Oliver Goldsmith The Deserted Village (1770)

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Poverty

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 →

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We spend our lives fighting to get people very slightly more stupid than ourselves to accept truths that the great men have always known.

Doris Lessing The Golden Notebook (1962)

It is better to be poor and walk in integrity than to be stupid and speak lies.

Solomon

If a poor person envies a rich person, he is no better than the rich person.

Leo Tolstoy

The poor, by thinking unceasingly of money, reach the point of losing the spiritual advantages of non-possession, thereby sinking as low as the rich.

Emil Cioran The Trouble With Being Born (1973)

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.