Jonathan Swift Quotes
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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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The tucked-up sempstress walks with hasty strides, While streams run down her oil'd umbrella's sides.
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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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Not die here in a rage, like a poisoned rat in a hole.
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111 company is like a dog, who dirts those most whom he loves best.
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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 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 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 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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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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Better belly burst than good liquor be lost.
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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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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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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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Brisk talkers are generally slow thinkers.
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A carpenter is known by his chips.
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The axe of intemperance has lopped off his green boughs and left him a withered trunk.
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The power of fortune is confessed only by the miserable, for the happy impute all their success to prudence or merit.