Jonathan Swift Quotes
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Censure is the tax a man pays to the public for being eminent.
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Coffee makes us severe, and grave and philosophical.
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The tucked-up sempstress walks with hasty strides, While streams run down her oil'd umbrella's sides.
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Not die here in a rage, like a poisoned rat in a hole.
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An intelligent person should put money in the beginning, but not in heart.
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I'm up and down and round about, Yet all the world can't find me out; Though hundreds have employed their leisure, They never yet could find my measure.
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I have been assured by a very knowing American of my acquaintance in London, that a young healthy child well nursed is at a year old a most delicious, nourishing, and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled; and I make no doubt that it will equally serve in a fricassee or a ragout.
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The worthiest people are the most injured by slander, as is the best fruit which the birds have been pecking at.
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The scholars of Ireland seem not to have the least conception of style, but run on in a flat phraseology, often mingled with barbarous terms.
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111 company is like a dog, who dirts those most whom he loves best.
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That the universe was formed by a fortuitous concourse of atoms, I will no more believe than that the accidental jumbling of the alphabet would fall into a most ingenious treatise of philosophy.
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The translators of the Bible were masters of an English style much fitter for that work than any we see in our present writings; the which is owing to the simplicity that runs through the whole.
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Better belly burst than good liquor be lost.
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That incessant envy wherewith the common rate of mankind pursues all superior natures to their own.
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The affectation of some late authors to introduce and multiply cant words is the most ruinous corruption in any language.
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The sciences are found, like Hercules's oxen, by tracing them backward; and old sciences are unravelled like old stockings, by beginning at the foot.
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A poor spirit is poorer than a poor purse. A very few pounds a year would ease a man of the scandal of avarice.
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What we call the Irish Brogue is no sooner discovered, than it makes the deliverer, in the last degree, ridiculous and despised; and, from such a mouth, an Englishman expects nothing but bulls, blunders, and follies.
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For to enter the palace of learning at the great gate requires an expense of time and forms, therefore men of much haste and little ceremony are content to get in by the back-door.
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Falsehood flies, and truth comes limping after it, so that when men come to be undeceived, it is too late; the jest is over, and the tale hath had its effect.
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The preaching of divines helps to preserve well-inclined men in the course of virtue, but seldom or ever reclaims the vicious.
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Nothing is so great an example of bad manners as flattery. If you flatter all the company, you please none; If you flatter only one or two, you offend the rest.
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A carpenter is known by his chips.
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A ridiculous passion which hath no being but in play-books and romances.