Jonathan Swift Quotes
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Brisk talkers are generally slow thinkers.
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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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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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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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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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A college joke to cure the dumps.
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Satire, being levelled at all, is never resented for an offence by any.
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I won't quarrel with my bread and butter.
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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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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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All human race would be wits. And millions miss, for one that hits.
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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.
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Politics, as the word is commonly understood, are nothing but corruptions.
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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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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 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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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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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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Life is a tragedy wherein we sit as spectators for a while and then act our part in it.
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Quotations are best brought in to confirm some opinion controverted.
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But you think that it is time for me to have done with the world, and so I would if I could get into a better before I was called into the best, and not die here in a rage, like a poisoned rat in a hole.
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One principal object of good-breeding is to suit our behaviour to the three several degrees of men, our superiors, our equals, and those below us.