Jonathan Swift Quotes
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Wisdom is a fox who, after long hunting, will at last cost you the pains to dig out; it is a cheese, which, by how much the richer, has the thicker, the homlier, and the coarser coat; and whereof to a judicious palate, the maggots are best. It is a sack posset, wherein the deeper you go, you'll find it the sweeter. Wisdom is a hen, whose cackling we must value and consider, because it is attended with an egg. But lastly, it is a nut, which, unless you choose with judgment, may cost you a tooth, and pay you with nothing but a worm.
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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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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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A pleasant companion is as good as a coach.
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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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Polite Conversation Why, everyone one as they like; as the good woman said when she kissed her cow.
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Live every day as your last, because one of these days, it will be.
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Observation is an old man's memory.
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What some people invent the rest enlarge.
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It is not so much the being exempt from faults as the having overcome them that is an advantage to us; it being with the follies of the mind as with weeds of a field, which if destroyed and consumed upon the place where they grow, enrich and improve it more than if none had ever sprung there.
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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.
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He was a bold man that first ate an oyster.
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What vexes me most is, that my female friends, who could bear me very well a dozen years ago, have now forsaken me, although I am not so old in proportion to them as I formerly was: which I can prove by arithmetic, for then I was double their age, which now I am not. Letter to Alexander Pope. 7 Feb. 1736.
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It may pass for a maxim in State, that the administration cannot be placed in too few hands, nor the legislature in too many.
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Simplicity, without which no human performance can arrive at perfection.
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Undoubtedly, philosophers are in the right when they tell us that nothing is great or little otherwise than by comparison.
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A stander-by may sometimes, perhaps, see more of the game than he that plays it.
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Old men and comets have been reverenced for the same reason: their long beards, and pretences to foretell events.
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I will venture to affirm, that the three seasons wherein our corn has miscarried did no more contribute to our present misery, than one spoonful of water thrown upon a rat already drowned would contribute to his death; and that the present plentiful harvest, although it should be followed by a dozen ensuing, would no more restore us, than it would the rat aforesaid to put him near the fire, which might indeed warm his fur-coat, but never bring him back to life.
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Seamen have a custom, when they meet a whale, to fling him out an empty tub by way of amusement, to divert him from laying violent hands upon the ship.
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There is nothing constant in this world but inconsistency.
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The various opinions of philosophers have scattered through the world as many plagues of the mind as Pandora's box did those of the body; only with this difference, that they have not left hope at the bottom.
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Though fear should lend him pinions like the wind, yet swifter fate will seize him from behind.
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Argument is the worst sort of conversation.