Life & Wisdom Quote by Oliver Goldsmith

Goldsmith is defending human messiness with the scalpel of an Enlightenment moralist and the sympathy of a novelist. The line turns on a clever horticultural metaphor: moral reform as weeding. It sounds practical, even wholesome, until the twist lands - pull too hard and you uproot what you meant to save. The phrasing "so nearly allied" is doing quiet work, suggesting vice and virtue aren’t opposites on a battlefield but neighbors sharing a fence, even a root system. That is a pointed rebuke to anyone who thinks character can be purified without loss.

The intent isn’t to excuse bad behavior so much as to argue for proportion. Goldsmith lived in a culture newly obsessed with polish: manners, sensibility, the public performance of correctness in coffeehouses and drawing rooms. In that world, reform often meant sanding down the personality until it was socially legible. Goldsmith pushes back: the traits that make people vivid - ambition, pride, appetite, stubbornness - can produce harm, but they also power art, courage, loyalty, and drive. Trying to eliminate the "fault" can sterilize the person.

Subtextually, the quote is also a warning about reform movements and moral panics. The urge to clean up society can become a kind of vanity, a belief that virtue is simple if you’re strict enough. Goldsmith’s sentence resists that simplicity. It argues for moral ecology: characters are systems, not single defects, and the cost of righteousness can be the very excellence it claims to protect.