Jonathan Swift Quotes
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Argument, as usually managed, is the worst sort of conversation, as it is generally in books the worst sort of reading.
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I used to wonder how a man of birth and spirit could endure to be wholly insignificant and obscure in a foreign country, when he might live with lustre in his own.
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It is computed that eleven thousand persons have at several times suffered death rather than submit to break their eggs at the smaller end.
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There seems to be no part of knowledge in fewer hands than that of discerning when to have done.
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We have an intuitive sense of our duty.
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And surely one of the best rules in conversation is, never to say a thing which any of the company can reasonably wish had been left unsaid.
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A tavern is a place where madness is sold by the bottle.
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Neither are any wars so furious and bloody, or of so long continuance as those occasioned by difference in opinion, especially if it be in things indifferent.
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Love why do we one passion call, When 'tis a compound of them all? Where hot and cold, where sharp and sweet, In all their equipages meet; Where pleasures mix'd with pains appear, Sorrow with joy, and hope with fear.
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Although men are accused of not knowing their own weakness, yet perhaps few know their own strength. It is in men as in soils, where sometimes there is a vein of gold which the owner knows not of.
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I'll give you leave to call me anything, if you don't call me spade.
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The most ignorant person, at a reasonable charge, and with a little bodily labour, might write books in philosophy, poetry, politics, laws, mathematics, and theology, without the least assistance from genius or study.
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Complaint is the largest tribute heaven receives and the sincerest part of our devotion.
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The more careless, the more modish.
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Have you not observed that there is a lower kind of discretion and regularity, which seldom fails of raising men to the highest station in the court, the church, and the law?
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My father had a small Estate in Nottinghamshire; I was the Third of five Sons.
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Men of great parts are often unfortunate in the management of public business, because they are apt to go out of the common road by the quickness of their imagination.
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There is no talent so useful toward rising in the world, or which puts men more out of the reach of fortune, than that quality generally possessed by the dullest sort of men, and in common speech called discretion; a species of lower prudence, by the assistance of which, people of the meanest intellectuals, without any other qualification, pass through the world in great tranquillity, and with universal good treatment, neither giving nor taking offence.
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By candle-light nobody would have taken you for above five-and-twenty.
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Nothing is so hard for those who abound in riches as to conceive how others can be in want.
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When we are old, our friends find it difficult to please us, and are less concerned whether we be pleased or not.
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When a true genius appears, you can know him by this sign: that all the dunces are in a confederacy against him.
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They say fish should swim thrice * * * first it should swim in the sea (do you mind me?) then it should swim in butter, and at last, sirrah, it should swim in good claret.
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Poor nations are hungry, and rich nations are proud; and pride and hunger will ever be at variance.