-
Such a man, truly wise, creams off Nature leaving the sour and the dregs for philosophy and reason to lap up.
Jonathan Swift -
When I am reading a book, whether wise or silly, it seems to me to be alive and talking to me.
Jonathan Swift
-
Old men and comets have been reverenced for the same reason: their long beards, and pretences to foretell events.
Jonathan Swift -
Satire is a sort of glass, wherein beholders do generally discover everybody's face but their own.
Jonathan Swift -
No man will take counsel, but every man will take money. Therefore, money is better than counsel.
Jonathan Swift -
Where Young must torture his invention To flatter knaves, or lose his pension.
Jonathan Swift -
I never knew a man come to greatness or eminence who lay abed late in the morning.
Jonathan Swift -
That was excellently observed’, say I, when I read a passage in an author, where his opinion agrees with mine. When we differ, there I pronounce him to be mistaken.
Jonathan Swift
-
For the rest, whatever we have got has been by infinite labor, and search, and ranging through every corner of nature; the difference is that instead of dirt and poison, we have rather chosen to fill our hives with honey and wax, thus furnishing mankind with the two noblest of things, which are sweetness and light.
Jonathan Swift -
Possession, they say, is eleven points of the law.
Jonathan Swift -
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.
Jonathan Swift -
An idle reason lessens the weight of the good ones you gave before.
Jonathan Swift -
Last week I saw a woman flayed, and you will hardly believe, how much it altered her person for the worse.
Jonathan Swift -
... the atheists, libertines, despisers of religion ... that is to say all those who usually pass under the name of Free-thinkers.
Jonathan Swift
-
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.
Jonathan Swift -
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.
Jonathan Swift -
Men always grow vicious before they become unbelievers.
Jonathan Swift -
Fools are apt to imitate only the defects of their betters.
Jonathan Swift -
He that calls a man ungrateful sums up all the veil that a man can be guilty of.
Jonathan Swift -
Simplicity, without which no human performance can arrive at perfection.
Jonathan Swift
-
Hobbes clearly proves, that every creature Lives in a state of war by nature.
Jonathan Swift -
The two maxims of any great man at court are, always to keep his countenance, and never to keep his word.
Jonathan Swift -
So, naturalists observe, a flea; Hath smaller fleas that on him prey; And these have smaller fleas to bite 'em, And so proceed ad infinitum.
Jonathan Swift -
There are certain common privileges of a writer, the benefit whereof, I hope, there will be no reason to doubt; particularly, that where I am not understood, it shall be concluded, that something very useful and profound is couched underneath; and again, that whatever word or sentence is printed in a different character, shall be judged to contain something extraordinary either or wit of sublime.
Jonathan Swift