A Quote by Oliver Goldsmith
The ambitious are forever followed by adulation for they receive the most pleasure from flattery.
Related Quotes
I have always hated biography, and more especially, autobiography. If biography, the writer invariably finds it necessary to plaster the subject with praises, flattery and adulation and to invest him with all the Christian graces. If autobiography, the same plan is followed, but the writer apologizes for it.
The most subtle flattery that a woman can receive is by actions, not by words.
There is nothing in the world more difficult than candor, and nothing easier than flattery. If there is a hundredth of a fraction of a false note to candor, it immediately produces dissonance, and as a result, exposure. But in flattery, even if everything is false down to the last note, it is still pleasant, and people will listen not without pleasure; with coarse pleasure, perhaps, but pleasure nevertheless.
No adulation; 'tis the death of virtue; Who flatters, is of all mankind the lowest Save he who courts the flattery.
Flattery corrupts both the receiver and the giver; and adulation is not of more service to the people than to kings.
If men of eminence are exposed to censure on one hand, they are as much liable to flattery on the other. If they receive reproaches which are not due to them, they likewise receive praises which they do not deserve.
It's good to be slightly ambitious, but I believe one shouldn't be too calculative. It's good to be on the edge, but I have never followed my mind. I have always followed my heart. And it has yielded the right results.
Sheer flattery got me into the theater. Flattery always works with me, particularly the flattery of women.
Fearing no insult, asking for no crown, receive with indifference both flattery and slander, and do not argue with a fool.
It was the maxim, I think, of Alphonsus of Aragon, that dead counsellors are safest. The grave puts an end to flattery and artifice, and the information we receive from books is pure from interest, fear, and ambition. Dead counsellors are likewise most instructive, because they are heard with patience and with reverence.
Although I am small, ugly and dirty, I am highly ambitious, and at the slightest flattery, I immediately start to strut like a turkey.
It is necessary to the success of flattery, that it be accommodated to particular circumstances or characters, and enter the heart on that side where the passions are ready to receive it.
Epicurus recommends bread and cheese as the staple, and his emphasis is more on avoiding pain than on seeking pleasure, insofar as pleasure-seeking tends to be followed by painful after-effects.
Even the most scientific investigator in science, the most thoroughgoing Positivist, cannot dispense with fiction; he must at least make use of categories, and they are already fictions, analogical fictions, or labels, which give us the same pleasure as children receive when they are told the "name" of a thing.
There can hardly, I believe, be imagined a more desirable pleasure than that of praise unmixed with any possibility of flattery.
In whatever adulation you get, there's truth and there's not truth. And wherever they dog you, and they say it was horrible - there's truth and there's not truth. It's human nature to like to read the adulation more.
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