Jonathan Swift Quotes
-
A chuck under the chin is worth two kisses.
-
Blot out, correct, insert, refine, enlarge, diminish, interline. Be mindful, when invention fails. To scratch your head and bite your nails.
-
Quotations are best brought in to confirm some opinion controverted.
-
If the men of wit and genius would resolve never to complain in their works of critics and detractors, the next age would not know that they ever had any.
-
What they do in heaven we are ignorant of; what they do not do we are told expressly.
-
It is in men as in soils where sometimes there is a vein of gold which the owner knows not.
-
There were many times my pants were so thin I could sit on a dime and tell if it was heads or tails.
-
I row after health like a waterman.
-
Every age might perhaps produce one or two geniuses, if they were not sunk under the censure and obloquy of plodding, servile, imitating pedants.
-
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.
-
Last week I saw a woman flayed, and you will hardly believe, how much it altered her person for the worse.
-
Your notions of friendship are new to me; I believe every man is born with his quantum, and he cannot give to one without robbing another. I very well know to whom I would give the first place in my friendship, but they are not in the way, I am condemned to another scene, and therefore I distribute it in pennyworths to those about me, and who displease me least, and should do the same to my fellow prisoners if I were condemned to a jail.
-
Just get the right syllable in the proper place.
-
Power is no blessing in itself, except when it is used to protect the innocent.
-
Fools are apt to imitate only the defects of their betters.
-
It is the first rule in oratory that a man must appear such as he would persuade others to be: and that can be accomplished only by the force of his life.
-
Where Young must torture his invention To flatter knaves, or lose his pension.
-
Philosophy! the lumber of the schools.
-
I never knew a man come to greatness or eminence who lay abed late in the morning.
-
The two maxims of any great man at court are, always to keep his countenance, and never to keep his word.
-
Oh how our neighbour lifts his nose, To tell what every schoolboy knows.
-
Come hither, all ye empty things, Ye bubbles rais'd by breath of Kings; Who float upon the tide of state, Come hither, and behold your fate. Let pride be taught by this rebuke, How very mean a thing's a Duke; From all his ill-got honours flung, Turn'd to that dirt from whence he sprung.
-
If a man would register all his opinions upon love, politics, religion, learning etc., beginning from his youth, and so go to old age, what a bundle of inconsistencies and contradictions would appear at last.
-
Punning is an art of harmonious jingling upon words, which, passing in at the ears, excites a titillary motion in those parts; and this, being conveyed by the animal spirits into the muscles of the face, raises the cockles of the heart.