"Man wants but little here below, nor wants that little long"
About this Quote
Goldsmith compresses an entire moral universe into a neat, almost singsong line, then lets the bleakness bloom after you’ve already nodded along. “Man wants but little” sounds like rustic wisdom: a corrective to greed, a pre-industrial shrug at excess. The turn is the kicker: “nor wants that little long.” It’s not just that our needs are modest; it’s that the self is unstable, desire slippery, satisfaction perishable. You can hear the cynicism tucked inside the cadence, a couplet that behaves like a lullaby while it quietly denies the possibility of lasting contentment.
The specific intent is double-edged. On one side, it flatters the fantasy of simplicity, the idea that a good society could be built on restrained appetites. On the other, it indicts human restlessness as a structural problem: even if you gave people “little,” they’d soon want something else. The subtext is less about poverty than about the metabolism of wanting. Desire isn’t a response to scarcity; it’s a habit of mind.
Context matters. Goldsmith wrote in an 18th-century Britain where consumer culture was accelerating, empire was feeding novelty into everyday life, and old pastoral ideals were becoming literary nostalgia. The line comes from The Hermit, a poem invested in moral lessons, yet it refuses easy piety. It works because it’s aphoristic without being comforting: the first clause offers virtue, the second withdraws it, leaving readers with the uneasy recognition that moderation may be admirable, but it’s not our default setting.
The specific intent is double-edged. On one side, it flatters the fantasy of simplicity, the idea that a good society could be built on restrained appetites. On the other, it indicts human restlessness as a structural problem: even if you gave people “little,” they’d soon want something else. The subtext is less about poverty than about the metabolism of wanting. Desire isn’t a response to scarcity; it’s a habit of mind.
Context matters. Goldsmith wrote in an 18th-century Britain where consumer culture was accelerating, empire was feeding novelty into everyday life, and old pastoral ideals were becoming literary nostalgia. The line comes from The Hermit, a poem invested in moral lessons, yet it refuses easy piety. It works because it’s aphoristic without being comforting: the first clause offers virtue, the second withdraws it, leaving readers with the uneasy recognition that moderation may be admirable, but it’s not our default setting.
Quote Details
| Topic | Contentment |
|---|---|
| Source | Oliver Goldsmith, The Deserted Village (poem, 1770) — contains the line 'Man wants but little here below, nor wants that little long'. |
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