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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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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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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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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We have enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love one another.
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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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Every man desires to live long, but no man wishes to be old.
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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 the folly of too many to mistake the echo of a London coffee-house for the voice of the kingdom.
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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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Some dire misfortune to portend, no enemy can match a friend.
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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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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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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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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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Though fear should lend him pinions like the wind, yet swifter fate will seize him from behind.
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The most ignorant person, at a reasonable charge, and with a little bodily labour, might write books in philosophy, poetry, politics, laws, mathematics, and theology, without the least assistance from genius or study.
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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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"Lawyers Are": Those whose interests and abilities lie in perverting, confounding and eluding the law.
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From not the gravest of Divines, Accept for once some serious Lines.
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When dunces are satiric, I take it for a panegyric.
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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 seems to be no part of knowledge in fewer hands than that of discerning when to have done.
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There never appear more than five or six men of genius in an age, but if they were united the world could not stand before them.