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Life & Wisdom Quote by Oliver Goldsmith

"There are some faults so nearly allied to excellence that we can scarce weed out the vice without eradicating the virtue"

About this Quote

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.

Quote Details

TopicEthics & Morality
SourceThe Vicar of Wakefield, Oliver Goldsmith, 1766 (novel).
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Citation Formats

APA Style (7th ed.)
Goldsmith, Oliver. (2026, January 16). There are some faults so nearly allied to excellence that we can scarce weed out the vice without eradicating the virtue. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/there-are-some-faults-so-nearly-allied-to-137666/

Chicago Style
Goldsmith, Oliver. "There are some faults so nearly allied to excellence that we can scarce weed out the vice without eradicating the virtue." FixQuotes. January 16, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/there-are-some-faults-so-nearly-allied-to-137666/.

MLA Style (9th ed.)
"There are some faults so nearly allied to excellence that we can scarce weed out the vice without eradicating the virtue." FixQuotes, 16 Jan. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/there-are-some-faults-so-nearly-allied-to-137666/. Accessed 12 Feb. 2026.

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Goldsmith on Virtue and Vice: When Excellence Borders Fault
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About the Author

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Oliver Goldsmith (November 10, 1730 - April 4, 1774) was a Poet from Ireland.

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