Jonathan Swift Quotes
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Words are but wind; and learning is nothing but words; ergo, learning is nothing but wind.
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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.
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Punning is a talent which no man affects to despise but he that is without it.
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The more careless, the more modish.
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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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Hoever wishes to win in this game must have patience and money, since the values are so little constant and the rumors so little founded on truth Vision is the art of seeing things invisible.
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Ay, do despise me, I'm the prouder for it; I like to be despised.
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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.
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You cannot reason a person out of something they were not reasoned into.
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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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If a lump of soot falls into the soup and you cannot conveniently get it out, stir it well in and it will give the soup a French taste.
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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.
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I shall be like that tree-I shall die at the top.
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Poor nations are hungry, and rich nations are proud; and pride and hunger will ever be at variance.
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God hath intended our passions to prevail over reason.
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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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By candle-light nobody would have taken you for above five-and-twenty.
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We are so fond on one another because our ailments are the same.
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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.
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What religion is he of? Why, he is an Anythingarian.
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When a true genius appears, you can know him by this sign: that all the dunces are in a confederacy against him.
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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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Nothing more unqualified the man to act with prudence than a misfortune that is attended with shame and guilt.
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Every dog must have his day.