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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.
Jonathan Swift -
She 's no chicken; she 's on the wrong side of thirty, if she be a day.
Jonathan Swift
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A ridiculous passion which hath no being but in play-books and romances.
Jonathan Swift -
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.
Jonathan Swift -
A college joke to cure the dumps.
Jonathan Swift -
A lie does not consist in the indirect position of words, but in the desire and intention, by false speaking, to deceive and injure your neighbour.
Jonathan Swift -
Politics, as the word is commonly understood, are nothing but corruptions.
Jonathan Swift -
All human race would be wits. And millions miss, for one that hits.
Jonathan Swift
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The axe of intemperance has lopped off his green boughs and left him a withered trunk.
Jonathan Swift -
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.
Jonathan Swift -
Satire, being levelled at all, is never resented for an offence by any.
Jonathan Swift -
The translators of the Bible were masters of an English style much fitter for that work than any we see in our present writings; the which is owing to the simplicity that runs through the whole.
Jonathan Swift -
It is a maxim, that those, to whom everybody allows the second place, have an undoubted title to the first.
Jonathan Swift -
I won't quarrel with my bread and butter.
Jonathan Swift
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No wise man ever wished to be younger.
Jonathan Swift -
An English tongue, if refined to a certain standard, might perhaps be fixed forever.
Jonathan Swift -
Then, rising with Aurora's light, The Muse invoked, sit down to write; Blot out, correct, insert, refine, Enlarge, diminish, interline.
Jonathan Swift -
Life is a tragedy wherein we sit as spectators for a while and then act our part in it.
Jonathan Swift -
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.
Jonathan Swift -
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.
Jonathan Swift
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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.
Jonathan Swift -
Fine words! I wonder where you stole them.
Jonathan Swift -
Ale is meat, drink and cloth; it will make a cat speak and a wise man dumb.
Jonathan Swift -
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."
Jonathan Swift