Jonathan Swift Quotes
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I'm as old as my tongue and a little older than my teeth.
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An atheist has got one point beyond the devil.
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My nose itched, and I knew I should drink wine or kiss a fool.
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It often happens that, if a lie be believed only for an hour, it has done its work, and there is no further occasion for it.
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Let a man be never so wise, he may be caught with sober lies.
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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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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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War: that mad game the world so loves to play.
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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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Positiveness is a good quality for preachers and speakers because, whoever shares his thoughts with the public will convince them as he himself appears convinced.
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I always love to begin a journey on Sundays, because I shall have the prayers of the church to preserve all that travel by land, or water.
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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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We have an intuitive sense of our duty.
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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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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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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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A tavern is a place where madness is sold by the bottle.
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Nothing more unqualified the man to act with prudence than a misfortune that is attended with shame and guilt.
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My father had a small Estate in Nottinghamshire; I was the Third of five Sons.
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Punning is a talent which no man affects to despise but he that is without it.
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Ever eating, never cloying, All-devouring, all-destroying Never finding full repast, Till I eat the world at last.
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Every day is an opportunity to make a new happy ending. May you live all the days of your life.
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Ay, do despise me, I'm the prouder for it; I like to be despised.
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The more careless, the more modish.