Jonathan Swift Quotes
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It is a miserable thing to live in suspense; it is the life of the spider.
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In all I wish, how happy should I be, Thou grand Deluder, were it not for thee? So weak thou art that fools thy power despise; And yet so strong, thou triumph'st o'er the wise.
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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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Argument is the worst sort of conversation.
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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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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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Don't set your wit against a child.
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It is the talent of human nature to run from one extreme to another.
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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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Hail, follow, well met, All dirty and wet: Find out, if you can, Who's master, who's man.
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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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Religion seems to have grown an infant with age, and requires miracles to nurse it, as it had in its infancy.
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When dunces are satiric, I take it for a panegyric.
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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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And surely one of the best rules in conversation is, never to say a thing which any of the company can reasonably wish had been left unsaid.
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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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Story-telling is subject to two unavoidable defects,--frequent repetition and being soon exhausted; so that, whoever values this gift in himself, has need of a good memory, and ought frequently to shift his company.
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If they would, for Example, praise the Beauty of a Woman, or any other Animal, they describe it by Rhombs, Circles, Parallelograms, Ellipses, and other geometrical terms.
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In church your grandsire cut his throat; to do the job too long he tarried: he should have had my hearty vote to cut his throat before he married.
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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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He that calls a man ungrateful sums up all the veil that a man can be guilty of.
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Patience alleviates, as impatience augments, pain; thus persons of strong will suffer less than those who give way to irritation.
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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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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.