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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I row after health like a waterman.
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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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It is the talent of human nature to run from one extreme to another.
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Usually speaking, the worst-bred person in company is a young traveller just returned from abroad.
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Hobbes clearly proves, that every creature Lives in a state of war by nature.
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Ah, a German and a genius! A prodigy, admit him!
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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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Men always grow vicious before they become unbelievers.
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Fools are apt to imitate only the defects of their betters.
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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.
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Whence proceeds this weight we lay On what detracting people say? Their utmost malice cannot make Your head, or tooth, or finger ache; Nor spoil your shapes, distort your face, Or put one feature out of place.
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A pleasant companion is as good as a coach.
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Some dire misfortune to portend, no enemy can match a friend.
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Imaginary evils soon become real ones by indulging our reflections on them; as he who in a melancholy fancy sees something like a face on the wall or the wainscot can, by two or three touches with a lead pencil, make it look visible, and agreeing with what he fancied.
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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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When a man is made a spiritual peer he loses his surname; when a temporal, his Christian name.
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What some people invent the rest enlarge.
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He that calls a man ungrateful sums up all the veil that a man can be guilty of.
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If Heaven had looked upon riches to be a valuable thing, it would not have given them to such a scoundrel.
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Possession, they say, is eleven points of the law.
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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.
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Pride, ill nature, and want of sense, are the three great sources of ill manners.
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A traveler's chief aim should be to make men wiser and better, and to improve their minds by the bad-as well as good example of what they deliver concerning foreign places.