Jonathan Swift Quotes
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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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Bread is the staff of life.
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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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How is it possible to expect that mankind will take advice when they will not so much as take warning.
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I'll give you leave to call me anything, if you don't call me spade.
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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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She watches him as a cat would watch a mouse.
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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 I am reading a book, whether wise or silly, it seems to me to be alive and talking to me.
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When dunces are satiric, I take it for a panegyric.
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By candle-light nobody would have taken you for above five-and-twenty.
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The more careless, the more modish.
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We have an intuitive sense of our duty.
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For in that universal call, Few bankers will to heaven be mounters; They'll cry, "Ye shops, upon us fall! Conceal and cover us, ye counters! When other hands the scales shall hold, And they, in men's and angels' sight Produced with all their bills and gold, 'Weigh'd in the balance and found light!'
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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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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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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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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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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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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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It is impossible that anything so natural, so necessary, and so universal as death, should ever have been designed by providence as an evil to mankind.
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My father had a small Estate in Nottinghamshire; I was the Third of five Sons.
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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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Books, the children of the brain.