Jonathan Swift Quotes
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The sight of you is good for sore eyes.
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We have an intuitive sense of our duty.
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I shall be like that tree-I shall die at the top.
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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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This Day, whate'er the Fates decree; Shall still be kept with Joy by me: This Day then, let us not be told, That you are sick, and I grown old
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It is remarkable with what Christian fortitude and resignation we can bear the suffering of other folks.
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Faith, that's as well said as if I had said it myself.
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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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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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My father had a small Estate in Nottinghamshire; I was the Third of five Sons.
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She wears her clothes as if they were thrown on with a pitchfork.
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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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I never wonder to see men wicked, but I often wonder to see them not ashamed.
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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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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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And he gave it for his opinion, "that whoever could make two ears of corn, or two blades of grass, to grow upon a spot of ground where only one grew before, would deserve better of mankind, and do more essential service to his country, than the whole race of politicians put together.
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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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There are but three ways for a man to revenge himself of the censure of the world,--to despise it, to return the like, or to endeavor to live so as to avoid it; the first of these is usually pretended, the last is almost impossible, the universal practice is for the second.
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Do you think I was born in a wood to be afraid of an owl?
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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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There is no vice which mankind carries to such wild extremes as that of avarice.
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Under the rose, since here are none but friends, To own the truth we have some private ends.
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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.