Jonathan Swift Quotes
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There are few wild beasts more to be dreaded than a talking man having nothing to say.
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Usually speaking, the worst-bred person in company is a young traveller just returned from abroad.
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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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What some people invent the rest enlarge.
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He was a bold man that first ate an oyster.
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Pray steal me not, I'm Mrs. Dingley's, Whose heart in this four-footed thing lies.
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Satire is a sort of glass, wherein beholders do generally discover everybody's face but their own.
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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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We have enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love one another.
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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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Simplicity, without which no human performance can arrive at perfection.
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It is as hard to satirize well a man of distinguished vices, as to praise well a man of distinguished virtues.
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Your onions should be thoroughly boiled.
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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 maxim in law has more weight in the world than an article of faith.
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Arbitrary power is the natural object of temptation to a prince, as wine and women to a young fellow, or a bribe to a judge, or avarice to old age.
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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 is a miserable thing to live in suspense; it is the life of the spider.
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Love why do we one passion call, When 'tis a compound of them all? Where hot and cold, where sharp and sweet, In all their equipages meet; Where pleasures mix'd with pains appear, Sorrow with joy, and hope with fear.
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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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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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Ah, a German and a genius! A prodigy, admit him!
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Lord, Madame, I have fed like a farmer; I shall grow as fat as a porpoise.
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Possession, they say, is eleven points of the law.