Jonathan Swift Quotes
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Vanity is a mark of humility rather than of pride.
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Words are but wind; and learning is nothing but words; ergo, learning is nothing but wind.
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Reasoning will never make a man correct an ill opinion, which by reasoning he never acquired.
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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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Religion supposed Heaven and Hell, the word of God, and sacraments, and twenty other circumstances which, taken seriously, are a wonderful check to wit and humour.
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Kitchen Physic is the best Physic.
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It is a maxim among these lawyers, that whatever hath been done before, may legally be done again: and therefore they take special care to record all the decisions formerly made against common justice and the general reason of mankind.
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Promises and pie-crust are made to be broken.
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Modesty may make a fool seem a man of sense.
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My nose itched, and I knew I should drink wine or kiss a fool.
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Abstracts, abridgments, summaries, etc., have the same use with burning-glasses,--to collect the diffused light rays of wit and learning in authors, and make them point with warmth and quickness upon the reader's imagination.
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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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Vision is the Art of seeing Things invisible.
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This single Stick, which you now behold ingloriously lying in that neglected Corner, I once knew in a flourishing State in a Forest: It was full of Sap, full of Leaves, and full of Boughs: But now, in vain does the busy Art of Man pretend to vie with Nature, by tying that withered Bundle of Twigs to its sapless Trunk: It is at best but the Reverse of what it was; a Tree turned upside down, the Branches on the Earth, and the Root in the Air.
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Rebukes are easy from our betters, From men of quality and letters; But when low dunces will affront, What man alive can stand the brunt?
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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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When a real genius appeares in this world, you'll know him by the fact that all the fools have allied against him.
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It is very unfair in any writer to employ ignorance and malice together, because it gives his answerer double work.
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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.
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Faith, that's as well said as if I had said it myself.
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Do you think I was born in a wood to be afraid of an owl?
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I never wonder to see men wicked, but I often wonder to see them not ashamed.
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She wears her clothes as if they were thrown on with a pitchfork.
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I shall be like that tree-I shall die at the top.