Jonathan Swift Quotes
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This wine should be eaten, it is too good to be drunk.
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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.
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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.
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What they do in heaven we are ignorant of; what they do not do we are told expressly.
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Polite Conversation Why, everyone one as they like; as the good woman said when she kissed her cow.
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I've often wish'd that I had clear, For life, six hundred pounds a year; A handsome house to lodge a friend; A river at my garden's end; A terrace walk, and half a rood Of land set out to plant a wood.
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It is a miserable thing to live in suspense; it is the life of the spider.
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... the atheists, libertines, despisers of religion ... that is to say all those who usually pass under the name of Free-thinkers.
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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.
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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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The tiny Lilliputians surmise that Gulliver's watch may be his god, because it is that which, he admits, he seldom does anything without consulting.
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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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Such a man, truly wise, creams off Nature leaving the sour and the dregs for philosophy and reason to lap up.
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A fig for partridges and quails, ye dainties I know nothing of ye; But on the highest mount in Wales Would choose in peace to drink my coffee.
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It is the folly of too many to mistake the echo of a London coffee-house for the voice of the kingdom.
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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.
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Some dire misfortune to portend, no enemy can match a friend.
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I never knew a man come to greatness or eminence who lay abed late in the morning.
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It is the talent of human nature to run from one extreme to another.
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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.
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Come, agree, the law's costly.
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Silks, velvets, calicoes, and the whole lexicon of female fopperies.
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When a man is made a spiritual peer he loses his surname; when a temporal, his Christian name.