Jonathan Swift Quotes
-
The more careless, the more modish.
-
Ay, do despise me, I'm the prouder for it; I like to be despised.
-
It is in disputes as in armies, where the weaker side sets up false lights, and makes a great noise, to make the enemy believe them more numerous and strong than they really are.
-
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.
-
What religion is he of? Why, he is an Anythingarian.
-
Kitchen Physic is the best Physic.
-
I'll give you leave to call me anything, if you don't call me spade.
-
Exploding many things under the name of trifles is a very false proof either of wisdom or magnanimity, and a great check to virtuous actions with regard to fame.
-
I shall be like that tree-I shall die at the top.
-
Nothing is so hard for those who abound in riches as to conceive how others can be in want.
-
Poor nations are hungry, and rich nations are proud; and pride and hunger will ever be at variance.
-
Judges... are picked out from the most dextrous lawyers, who are grown old or lazy, and having been biased all their lives against truth or equity, are under such a fatal necessity of favoring fraud, perjury and oppression, that I have known several of them to refuse a large bribe from the side where justice lay, rather than injure the faculty by doing any thing unbecoming their nature in office.
-
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.
-
Some men, under the notion of weeding out prejudice, eradicate virtue, honesty and religion.
-
You cannot reason a person out of something they were not reasoned into.
-
I forget whether advice be among the lost things which Ariosto says are to be found in the moon: that and time ought to have been there.
-
We are so fond on one another because our ailments are the same.
-
God hath intended our passions to prevail over reason.
-
Men who possess all the advantages of life are in a state where there are many accidents to disorder and discompose, but few to please them.
-
To acknowledge you were wrong yesterday is simply to let the world know that you are wiser today than you were then.
-
By candle-light nobody would have taken you for above five-and-twenty.
-
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.
-
Perverseness is your whole defence.
-
In all distresses of our friends We first consult our private ends; While Nature, kindly bent to ease us, Points out some circumstance to please us.