Oliver Goldsmith Mind Quotations

Novels teach the youthful mind to sigh after happiness that never existed.

The little mind who loves itself, will wr'te and think with the vulgar; but the great mind will be bravely eccentric, and scorn the beaten road, from universal benevolence.

There is yet a silent agony in which the mind appears to disdain all external help, and broods over its distresses with gloomy reserve. This is the most dangerous state of mind; accidents or friendships may lessen the louder kinds of grief, but all remedies for this must be had from within, and there despair too often finds the most deadly enemy.

Friendship is made up of esteem and pleasure; pity is composed of sorrow and contempt: the mind may for some time fluctuate between them, but it can never entertain both at once.

The loud laugh that spoke the vacant mind.

Vain, very vain is my search to find; that happiness which only centers in the mind.

As for disappointing them I should not so much mind; but I can't abide to disappoint myself.

A mind too vigorous and active, serves only to consume the body to which it is joined.

Logicians have but ill defined As rational the human mind; Reason, they say, belongs to man, But let them prove it if they can.

The mind is ever ingenious in making its own distress.

Processions, cavalcades, and all that fund of gay frippery, furnished out by tailors, barbers, and tire-women, mechanically influence the mind into veneration; an emperor in his nightcap would not meet with half the respect of an emperor with a crown.