A Quote by Oliver Goldsmith

Quality and title have such allurements that hundreds are ready to give up all their own importance, to cringe, to flatter, to look little, and to pall every pleasure in constraint, merely to be among the great, though without the least hopes of improving their understanding or sharing their generosity. They might be happier among their equals.

Oliver Goldsmith

Quote Topics

Among Constraint Cringe Equals Every Flatter Generosity Give Great Happier Hopes Hundreds Importance Improving Least Little Look Merely Might Own Pleasure Quality Ready Ready To Give Up Sharing Though Title Understanding Up Without

Quote Author

Oliver Goldsmith
Irish - Novelist
November 10, 1730 - April 4, 1774

She had never realized any love save love as passion. Such love, though it expends itself in generosity and thoughtfulness, though it give birth to visions and to great poetry, remains among the sharpest expressions of self-interest. Not until it has passed though a long servitude, though its own self-hatred, though mockery, though great doubts, can it take its place among the loyalties. Many who have spent a lifetime in it can tell us less of love than the child that lost a dog yesterday.

Thornton Wilder

Among the many strange servilities mistaken for pieties, one of the least lovely is that which hopes to flatter God by despising the world, and vilifying human nature.

George Henry Lewes

Among the noblest in the land - Though man may count himself the least - That man I honor and revere, Who without favor, without fear, In the great city dares to stand, The friend of every friendless beast.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Among the wealthy, generosity is often merely a kind of shyness.

Friedrich Nietzsche

The cultivation of generosity is the beginning of spiritual awakening. Generosity has tremendous force because it arises from an inner quality of letting go. Being able to let go, to give up, to renounce, and to give generously all spring from the same source, and when we practice generosity ... we open up these qualities within ourselves.

Sharon Salzberg

My opinion has always been this, that you ought to never give up as long as you live, even though they have stolen everything from you. If nothing else, you can always call the air you breath your own, or at any rate you can claim that you have it on loan. Yes, lass, last night I ate stolen bread and left my son among men who are going to use pick-handles on the authorities, so I thought I might just as well look you up this morning.

Halldor Laxness

Among giants, try and be a dwarf; among dwarfs, try and be a giant; but among equals, try and be an equal

Stanislaw Jerzy Lec

For the sake of the Gospel, it was worth it… All you have to do is look at any society where there is no Jesus. I’ll give you four: Nazis, no Jesus. Look at their record. Uh, Shintos? They started this thing in Pearl Harbor. Any Jesus among them? None. Communists? None. Islamists? Zero. That’s eighty years of ideologies that have popped up where no Jesus was allowed among those four groups. Just look at the records as far as murder goes among those four groups.

Phil Robertson

We are led by the least among us - the least intelligent, the least noble, the least visionary. We are led by the least among us and we do not fight back against the dehumanizing values that are handed down as control icons.

Terence McKenna

My problem might be that even if I did go home, I wouldn’t belong there, among people who give without thinking and care without trying.

Veronica Roth

If there is no friendship with them [the poor] and no sharing of the life of the poor, then there is no authentic commitment to liberation, because love exists only among equals.

Gustavo Gutiérrez

To the other nations of the world, religion is one among the many occupations of life. There is politics, there are the enjoyments of social life, there is all that wealth can buy or power can bring, there is all that the senses can enjoy; and among all these various occupations of life and all this searching after something which can give yet a little more whetting to the cloyed senses - among all these, there is perhaps a little bit of religion. But here, in India, religion is the one and the only occupation of life.

Swami Vivekananda

Of those that spin out trifles and die without a memorial, many flatter themselves with high opinions of their own importance, and imagine that they are every day adding some improvement to human life.

Samuel Johnson

Of the rest some we know to be dead though they walk among us; some are not yet born though they go through the forms of life; others are hundreds of years old though they call themselves thirty-six.