Jonathan Swift Quotes
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A poor spirit is poorer than a poor purse. A very few pounds a year would ease a man of the scandal of avarice.
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Nothing is so great an example of bad manners as flattery. If you flatter all the company, you please none; If you flatter only one or two, you offend the rest.
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All human race would be wits. And millions miss, for one that hits.
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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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Brutes find out where their talents lie; A bear will not attempt to fly, A foundered horse will oft debate Before he tries a five barred gate. A dog by instinct turns aside Who sees the ditch too deep and wide, But man we find the only creature Who, led by folly, combats nature; Who, when she loudly cries-Forbear! With obstinacy fixes there; And where the genius least inclines, Absurdly bends his whole designs.
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I won't quarrel with my bread and butter.
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Cruel people are ever cowards in emergency.
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The axe of intemperance has lopped off his green boughs and left him a withered trunk.
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A ridiculous passion which hath no being but in play-books and romances.
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Reason is a very light rider, and easily shook off.
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The preaching of divines helps to preserve well-inclined men in the course of virtue, but seldom or ever reclaims the vicious.
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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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It is a maxim, that those, to whom everybody allows the second place, have an undoubted title to the first.
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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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No man will take counsel, but every man will take money. Therefore, money is better than counsel.
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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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Hereditary right should be kept sacred, not from any inalienable right in a particular family, but to avoid the consequences that usually attend the ambition of competitors.
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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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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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Praise is the daughter of present power.
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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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Life is a tragedy wherein we sit as spectators for a while and then act our part in it.
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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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All panegyrics are mingled with an infusion of poppy.