Jonathan Swift Quotes
-
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.
-
Strange an astrologer should die, without one wonder in the sky.
-
You cannot reason a person out of something they were not reasoned into.
-
When dunces are satiric, I take it for a panegyric.
-
It is as hard to satirize well a man of distinguished vices, as to praise well a man of distinguished virtues.
-
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.
-
Vain men delight in telling what Honours have been done them, what great Company they have kept, and the like; by which they plainly confess, that these Honours were more than their Due, and such as their Friends would not believe if they had not been told: Whereas a Man truly proud, thinks the greatest Honours below his Merit, and consequently scorns to boast. I therefore deliver it as a Maxim that whoever desires the Character of a proud Man, ought to conceal his Vanity.
-
A forward critic often dupes us With sham quotations peri hupsos, And if we have not read Longinus, Will magisterially outshine us. Then, lest with Greek he over-run ye, Procure the book for love or money, Translated from Boileau's translation, And quote quotation on quotation.
-
I'm as old as my tongue and a little older than my teeth.
-
There are few, very few, that will own themselves in a mistake.
-
This made me reflect, how vain an attempt it is for a man to endeavor to do himself honor among those who are out of all degree of equality or comparison with him.
-
There seems to be no part of knowledge in fewer hands than that of discerning when to have done.
-
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.
-
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.
-
There is nothing constant in this world but inconsistency.
-
I used to wonder how a man of birth and spirit could endure to be wholly insignificant and obscure in a foreign country, when he might live with lustre in his own.
-
Though fear should lend him pinions like the wind, yet swifter fate will seize him from behind.
-
Don't set your wit against a child.
-
Observation is an old man's memory.
-
The bulk of mankind is as well equipped for flying as thinking.
-
Your onions should be thoroughly boiled.
-
Under this window in stormy weather I marry this man and woman together; Let none but Him who rules the thunder Put this man and woman asunder.
-
Physicians ought not to give their judgment of religion, for the same reason that butchers are not admitted to be jurors upon life and death.
-
It may pass for a maxim in State, that the administration cannot be placed in too few hands, nor the legislature in too many.