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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.
Jonathan Swift -
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.
Jonathan Swift
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The two noblest of things, which are sweetness and light.
Jonathan Swift -
You should never be ashamed to admit you have been wrong. It only proves you are wiser today than yesterday.
Jonathan Swift -
For in reason, all government without the consent of the governed is the very definition of slavery.
Jonathan Swift -
Unjustly poets we asperse: Truth shines the brighter clad in verse, And all the fictions they pursue Do but insinuate what is true.
Jonathan Swift -
In men desire begets love, and in women love begets desire.
Jonathan Swift -
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.
Jonathan Swift
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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.
Jonathan Swift -
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.
Jonathan Swift -
The proper words in the proper places are the true definition of style.
Jonathan Swift -
As love without esteem is capricious and volatile; esteem without love is languid and cold.
Jonathan Swift -
Whoever makes the fewest persons uneasy, is the best bred man in company.
Jonathan Swift -
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.
Jonathan Swift
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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.
Jonathan Swift -
Very few men, properly speaking, live at present, but are providing to live another time.
Jonathan Swift -
I hate nobody: I am in charity with the world.
Jonathan Swift -
If a man makes me keep my distance, the comfort is, he keeps his at the same time.
Jonathan Swift -
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.
Jonathan Swift -
The stoical scheme of supplying our wants by lopping off our desires, is like cutting off our feet when we want shoes.
Jonathan Swift
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I wonder what fool it was that first invented kissing.
Jonathan Swift -
They say fingers were made before forks, and hands before knives.
Jonathan Swift -
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.
Jonathan Swift -
Censure is the tax a man pays to the public for being eminent.
Jonathan Swift