Wit & Attitude Quote by Oliver Goldsmith

Goldsmith understands a social truth that still plays like a hangover: foolishness is fun until it starts to feel like a mirror. The line pivots on timing - "first" versus "in the end" - as if laughter has an expiration date. Early on, fools are entertainment: they lower the stakes, let us feel sharper by comparison, turn awkward life into a little theater. But the melancholy arrives when the joke stops being safely external. Stay in that company long enough and you notice how easily foolishness spreads, how quickly it becomes the room's climate rather than a passing gag.

The subtext is less snobbish than it looks. Goldsmith isn't simply sneering at the uneducated; he's warning about the emotional cost of living on cheap amusement. Foolish company offers instant relief, then quietly hollows out conversation, ambition, even tenderness. You end up laughing, yes, but also stranded - aware that you have traded depth for noise. The "always" is the sharpest knife in the sentence: not sometimes, not if you're in the wrong mood, but inevitably, because sustained frivolity dodges the realities that eventually demand attention.

Context matters. Goldsmith wrote in an 18th-century culture of clubs, salons, taverns, and performance - a world where wit was social currency and "fools" were both literal and literary types. His poem-making moralism isn't preachy so much as observational: comedy is a social drug, and like most drugs, it tells on you the morning after.