Jonathan Swift Quotes
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The axe of intemperance has lopped off his green boughs and left him a withered trunk.
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She 's no chicken; she 's on the wrong side of thirty, if she be a day.
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I won't quarrel with my bread and butter.
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The best Maxim I know in this life is, to drink your Coffee when you can, and when you cannot, to be easy without it. While you continue to be splenetic, count upon it I will always preach. Thus much I sympathize with you that I am not cheerful enough to write, for I believe Coffee once a week is necessary to that.
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The power of fortune is confessed only by the miserable, for the happy impute all their success to prudence or merit.
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Cruel people are ever cowards in emergency.
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When any one person or body of men seize into their hands the power in the last resort, there is properly no longer a government, but what Aristotle and his followers call the abuse and corruption of one.
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A ridiculous passion which hath no being but in play-books and romances.
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For to enter the palace of learning at the great gate requires an expense of time and forms, therefore men of much haste and little ceremony are content to get in by the back-door.
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What we call the Irish Brogue is no sooner discovered, than it makes the deliverer, in the last degree, ridiculous and despised; and, from such a mouth, an Englishman expects nothing but bulls, blunders, and follies.
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The greatest Inventions were produced in Times of Ignorance; as the Use of the Compass, Gunpowder, and Printing; and by the dullest Nation, as the Germans.
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It is a maxim, that those, to whom everybody allows the second place, have an undoubted title to the first.
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All human race would be wits. And millions miss, for one that hits.
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I hope you will be ready to own publicly, whenever you shall be called to it, that by your great and frequent urgency you prevailed on me to publish a very loose and uncorrect account of my travels, with directions to hire some young gentleman of either university to put them in order, and correct the style, as my cousin Dampier did, by my advice, in his book called "A Voyage round the world."
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Small causes are sufficient to make a man uneasy, when great ones are not in the way: for want of a block he will stumble at a straw.
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Life is a tragedy wherein we sit as spectators for a while and then act our part in it.
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What poet would not grieve to see His brother write as well as he? But rather than they should excel, He'd wish his rivals all in Hell.
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The reason why so few marriages are happy is because young ladies spend their time in making nets, not in making cages.
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Then, rising with Aurora's light, The Muse invoked, sit down to write; Blot out, correct, insert, refine, Enlarge, diminish, interline.
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They have likewise discovered two lesser stars, or satellites, which revolve around Mars, whereof the innermost is distant from the center of the primary exactly three of his diameters, and the outermost five: the former revolves in the space of ten hours, and the latter in twenty-one and a half, so that the squares of their periodical times are very near in the same proportion with the cubes of their distances from the center of Mars; which evidently shows them to be governed by the same Law of Gravitation that influences the other heavenly bodies.
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Satire, being levelled at all, is never resented for an offence by any.
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No wise man ever wished to be younger.
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Good manners is the art of making those people easy with whom we converse. Whoever makes the fewest people uneasy is the best bred in the room.
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An English tongue, if refined to a certain standard, might perhaps be fixed forever.