Jonathan Swift Quotes
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I'll give you leave to call me anything, if you don't call me spade.
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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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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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How is it possible to expect that mankind will take advice when they will not so much as take warning.
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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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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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A tavern is a place where madness is sold by the bottle.
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When dunces are satiric, I take it for a panegyric.
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The more careless, the more modish.
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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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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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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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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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We have an intuitive sense of our duty.
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By candle-light nobody would have taken you for above five-and-twenty.
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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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It is likewise to be observed that this society hath a peculiar chant and jargon of their own, that no other mortal can understand, and wherein all their laws are written, which they take special care to multiply.
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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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All Pretences of foretelling by Astrology, are Deceits; for this manifest Reason, because the Wise and Learned, who can only judge whether there be any Truth in this Science, do all unanimously agree to laugh at and despise it; and none but the poor ignorant Vulgar give it any Credit.
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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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She watches him as a cat would watch a mouse.
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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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By the laws of God, of nature, of nations, and of your country you are and ought to be as free a people as your brethren in England.
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I love white Portugal wine better than claret, champagne, or burgundy. I have a sad vulgar appetite.