Jonathan Swift Quotes
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When I am reading a book, whether wise or silly, it seems to me to be alive and talking to me.
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An atheist has got one point beyond the devil.
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There never appear more than five or six men of genius in an age, but if they were united the world could not stand before them.
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A tavern is a place where madness is sold by the bottle.
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She watches him as a cat would watch a mouse.
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Under this window in stormy weather I marry this man and woman together; Let none but Him who rules the thunder Put this man and woman asunder.
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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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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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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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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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Nothing is so hard for those who abound in riches as to conceive how others can be in want.
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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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How is it possible to expect that mankind will take advice when they will not so much as take warning.
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Story-telling is subject to two unavoidable defects,--frequent repetition and being soon exhausted; so that, whoever values this gift in himself, has need of a good memory, and ought frequently to shift his company.
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You cannot reason a person out of something they were not reasoned into.
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Bread is the staff of life.
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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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Books, like men their authors, have no more than one wayofcoming intothe world, but there areten thousand to go out of it, and return no more.
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My father had a small Estate in Nottinghamshire; I was the Third of five Sons.
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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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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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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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Would a writer know how to behave himself with relation td posterity? Let him consider in old books what he finds that he is glad to know, and what omissions he most laments.
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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.