Life is a journey that must be traveled no matter how bad the roads and accommodations.
Oliver GoldsmithRead
Both wit and understanding are trifles without integrity; it is that which gives value to every character. The ignorant peasant, without fault, is greater than the philosopher with many; for what is genius or courage without a heart?
Interpretation
What this quote means
Integrity is essential for true value and character, outweighing knowledge or talent.
In this quote, Oliver Goldsmith emphasizes the importance of integrity as the foundation of true character. He suggests that even a simple, uneducated person with integrity holds more value than a knowledgeable philosopher who lacks moral principles. The quote challenges the notion that intellect or bravery are the most important attributes, highlighting instead the necessity of having a virtuous heart.
Themes
IntegrityCharacterWisdomHeartHonor
In practice
Example use cases
During a speech about leadership, you might say, 'As Oliver Goldsmith noted, both wit and understanding are trifles without integrity.'
More from Oliver Goldsmith
All quotes →A mind too vigorous and active, serves only to consume the body to which it is joined.
Oliver GoldsmithRead
Success consists of getting up just one more time than you fall.
Oliver GoldsmithRead
Whatever the skill of any country may be in the sciences, it is from its excellence in polite learning alone that it must expect a character from posterity.
Oliver GoldsmithRead
Life at the greatest and best is but a froward child, that must be humored and coaxed a little till it falls asleep, and then all the care is over.
Oliver GoldsmithRead
Hope, like the gleaming taper's light,_x000D_ _x000D_ Adorns and cheers our way;_x000D_ _x000D_ And still, as darker grows the night,_x000D_ _x000D_ Emits a brighter ray.
Oliver GoldsmithRead
Similar quotes
Whatever final judgment awaits 'Bush v. Gore' in the annals of history, I am certain that the good work and good faith of the U.S. federal judiciary as a whole will continue to sustain public confidence at a level never beyond repair.
Ruth Bader GinsburgRead
Silence. All human unhappiness comes from not knowing how to stay quietly in a room.
Blaise PascalRead
When we are young, we spend much time and pains in filling our note-books with all definitions of Religion, Love, Poetry, Politics, Art, in the hope that, in the course of a few years, we shall have condensed into our encyclopaedia the net value of all the theories at which the world has yet arrived. But year after year our tables get no completeness, and at last we discover that our curve is a parabola, whose arcs will never meet.
Ralph Waldo EmersonRead
I want [my daughter] to look at the world through the underside of a glass-bottom boat, to look through a microscope at the galaxies that exist on the pinpoint of a human mind.
Sarah KayRead
Resolved, to study the Scriptures so steadily, constantly and frequently, as that I may find, and plainly perceive myself to grow in the knowledge of the same.
Jonathan EdwardsRead
It is far more difficult to be simple than to be complicated; far more difficult to sacrifice skill and easy execution in the proper place, than to expand both indiscriminately.
John RuskinRead