Jonathan Swift Quotes
-
Satire is a sort of glass, wherein beholders do generally discover everybody's face but their own.
-
What some people invent the rest enlarge.
-
It is the folly of too many to mistake the echo of a London coffee-house for the voice of the kingdom.
-
Possession, they say, is eleven points of the law.
-
Hereditary right should be kept sacred, not from any inalienable right in a particular family, but to avoid the consequences that usually attend the ambition of competitors.
-
Dignity, high station, or great riches, are in some sort necessary to old men, in order to keep the younger at a distance, who are otherwise too apt to insult them upon the score of their age.
-
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.
-
Religion seems to have grown an infant with age, and requires miracles to nurse it, as it had in its infancy.
-
Just get the right syllable in the proper place.
-
Simplicity, without which no human performance can arrive at perfection.
-
I with borrow'd silver shine, What you see is none of mine. First I show you but a quarter, Like the bow that guards the Tartar: Then the half, and then the whole, Ever dancing round the pole.
-
If it were a rainy day, a drunken vigil, a fit of the spleen, a course of physic, sleepy Sunday, an ill run at dice, a long tailor's bill, a beggar's purse, a factious head, a hot sun, costive diet, want of books, and a just contempt for learning - but for these. . .the number of authors and of writing would dwindle away to a degree most woeful to behold.
-
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.
-
Old men and comets have been reverenced for the same reason: their long beards, and pretences to foretell events.
-
It is with wits as with razors, which are never so apt to cut those they are employed on as when they have lost their edge.
-
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.
-
I must complain the cards are ill shuffled till I have a good hand.
-
Undoubtedly, philosophers are in the right when they tell us that nothing is great or little otherwise than by comparison.
-
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.
-
No man will take counsel, but every man will take money. Therefore, money is better than counsel.
-
I cannot but conclude that the Bulk of your Natives, to be the most pernicious Race of little odious Vermin that Nature ever suffered to crawl upon the Surface of the Earth.
-
Praise is the daughter of present power.
-
Hail fellow, well met.
-
This wine should be eaten, it is too good to be drunk.