Jonathan Swift Quotes
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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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Coffee makes us severe, and grave and philosophical.
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Censure is the tax a man pays to the public for being eminent.
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An intelligent person should put money in the beginning, but not in heart.
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Not die here in a rage, like a poisoned rat in a hole.
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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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111 company is like a dog, who dirts those most whom he loves best.
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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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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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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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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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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 affectation of some late authors to introduce and multiply cant words is the most ruinous corruption in any language.
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Better belly burst than good liquor be lost.
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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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That incessant envy wherewith the common rate of mankind pursues all superior natures to their own.
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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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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 carpenter is known by his chips.
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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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Brisk talkers are generally slow thinkers.
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They have likewise discovered two lesser stars, or satellites, which revolve around Mars, whereof the innermost is distant from the center of the primary exactly three of his diameters, and the outermost five: the former revolves in the space of ten hours, and the latter in twenty-one and a half, so that the squares of their periodical times are very near in the same proportion with the cubes of their distances from the center of Mars; which evidently shows them to be governed by the same Law of Gravitation that influences the other heavenly bodies.
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A lie does not consist in the indirect position of words, but in the desire and intention, by false speaking, to deceive and injure your neighbour.
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The axe of intemperance has lopped off his green boughs and left him a withered trunk.