Jonathan Swift Quotes
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We of this age have discovered a shorter, and more prudent method to become scholars and wits, without the fatigue of reading or of thinking.
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Say, Britain, could you ever boast, Three poets in an age at most? Our chilling climate hardly bears A sprig of bays in fifty years.
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The two noblest of things, which are sweetness and light.
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You should never be ashamed to admit you have been wrong. It only proves you are wiser today than yesterday.
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Unjustly poets we asperse: Truth shines the brighter clad in verse, And all the fictions they pursue Do but insinuate what is true.
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For in reason, all government without the consent of the governed is the very definition of slavery.
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In men desire begets love, and in women love begets desire.
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I said there was a society of men among us, bred up from their youth in the art of proving by words multiplied for the purpose, that white is black, and black is white, according as they are paid. To this society all the rest of the people are as slaves.
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Pride, ill nature, and want of sense are the three great sources of ill manners; without some one of these defects, no man will behave himself ill for want of experience, or what, in the language of fools, is called knowing the world.
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The proper words in the proper places are the true definition of style.
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Who can deny that all men are violent lovers of the truth, when we see them so positive in their errors, which they will maintain out of their zeal for truth, although they contradict themselves every day of their lives.
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As love without esteem is capricious and volatile; esteem without love is languid and cold.
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Whoever makes the fewest persons uneasy, is the best bred man in company.
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I am convinced that if the virtuosi could once find out a world in the moon, with a passage to it, our women would wear nothing but what directly came from thence.
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I hate nobody: I am in charity with the world.
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In like manner, the disbelief of a Divine Providence renders a man uncapable of holding any public station; for, since kings avow themselves to be the deputies of Providence.
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The stoical scheme of supplying our wants by lopping off our desires, is like cutting off our feet when we want shoes.
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I have always a sacred veneration for anyone I observe to be a little out of repair in his person, as supposing him either a poet or a philosopher.
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Very few men, properly speaking, live at present, but are providing to live another time.
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If a man makes me keep my distance, the comfort is, he keeps his at the same time.
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They say fingers were made before forks, and hands before knives.
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I wonder what fool it was that first invented kissing.
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It is an uncontrolled truth, that no man ever made an ill figure who understood his own talents, nor a good one who mistook them.
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Censure is the tax a man pays to the public for being eminent.