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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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 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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I won't quarrel with my bread and butter.
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A college joke to cure the dumps.
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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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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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She 's no chicken; she 's on the wrong side of thirty, if she be a day.
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Cruel people are ever cowards in emergency.
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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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It is a maxim, that those, to whom everybody allows the second place, have an undoubted title to the first.
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A ridiculous passion which hath no being but in play-books and romances.
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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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All human race would be wits. And millions miss, for one that hits.
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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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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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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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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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Satire, being levelled at all, is never resented for an offence by any.
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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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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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No wise man ever wished to be younger.
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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.