Jonathan Swift Quotes
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Laws are like cobwebs, which may catch small flies, but let wasps and hornets break through.
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My hunger serves me instead of a clock.
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Philosophy! the lumber of the schools.
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He had been eight years upon a project for extracting sunbeams out of cucumbers, which were to be put into vials hermetically sealed, and let out to warm the air in raw, inclement summers.
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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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Every age might perhaps produce one or two geniuses, if they were not sunk under the censure and obloquy of plodding, servile, imitating pedants.
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There were many times my pants were so thin I could sit on a dime and tell if it was heads or tails.
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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.
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I have ever hated all nations, professions, and communities, and all my love is toward individuals: for instance, I hate the tribe of lawyers, but I love Counsellor Such-a-one, and Judge Such-a-one: so with physicians - I will not speak of my own trade - soldiers, English, Scotch, French, and the rest. But principally I hate and detest that animal called man, although I heartily love John, Peter, Thomas, and so forth. This is the system upon which I have governed myself many years, but do not tell.
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No man of honor, as the word is usually understood, did ever pretend that his honor obliged him to be chaste or temperate, to pay his creditors, to be useful to his country, to do good to mankind, to endeavor to be wise or learned, to regard his word, his promise, or his oath.
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Blot out, correct, insert, refine, enlarge, diminish, interline. Be mindful, when invention fails. To scratch your head and bite your nails.
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It is in men as in soils where sometimes there is a vein of gold which the owner knows not.
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The two maxims of any great man at court are, always to keep his countenance, and never to keep his word.
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I row after health like a waterman.
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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.
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Quotations are best brought in to confirm some opinion controverted.
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Oh how our neighbour lifts his nose, To tell what every schoolboy knows.
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Although the devil be the father of lies, he seems, like other great inventors, to have lost much of his reputation by the continual improvements that have been made upon him.
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Men are happy to be laughed at for their humor, but not for their folly.
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Last week I saw a woman flayed, and you will hardly believe, how much it altered her person for the worse.
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Where Young must torture his invention To flatter knaves, or lose his pension.
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In oratory the greatest art is to hide art.
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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.
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Fine words! I wonder where you stole them.