Jonathan Swift

Jonathan Swift (November 30, 1667 - October 19, 1745) Irish writer and satirist

Sourced:

• Every man desires to live long, but no man would be old.
  • Source: Thoughts on Various Subjects

• We have just enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love one another.
  • Source: Thoughts on Various Subjects

• Those dreams that on the silent night intrude, and with false flitting shapes our mids delude ... are mere productions of the brain. And fools consult interpreters in vain.
  • On Dreams (1727)

• He gave it for his opinion, that whoever could make two ears of corn, or two blades of grass, to grow upon a spot of ground where only one grew before, would deserve better of mankind, and do more essential service to his country, than the whole race of politicians put together.
  • Gulliver's Travels Voyage to Brobdingnag (Pt. II, Ch. 102)

Attributed:

• A man should never be ashamed to own that he has been in the wrong, which is but saying... that he is wiser today than yesterday.

• A tavern is a place where madness is sold by the bottle.

• Although men are accused of not knowing their own weakness, yet perhaps few know their own strength. It is in men as in soils, where sometimes there is a vein of gold which the owner knows not of.

• Ambition often puts men upon doing the meanest offices; so climbing is performed in the same posture with creeping.

• As blushing will sometimes make a whore pass for a virtuous woman, so modesty may make a fool seem a man of sense.

• As love without esteem is capricious and volatile; esteem without love is languid and cold.

• Blessed is he who expects nothing, for he shall never be disappointed.

• Books, the children of the brain.

• Censure is the tax a man pays to the public for being eminent.

• For in reason, all government without the consent of the governed is the very definition of slavery.

• Good manners is the art of making those people easy with whom we converse. Whoever makes the fewest people uneasy is the best bred in the room.

• He was a bold man that first ate on oyster.

• I never wonder to see men wicked, but I often wonder to see them not ashamed.

• I've always believed no matter how many shots I miss, I'm going to make the next one.

• Interest is the spur of the people, but glory that of great souls. Invention is the talent of youth, and judgment of age.

• It is impossible that anything so natural, so necessary, and so universal as death, should ever have been designed by providence as an evil to mankind.

• It is useless to attempt to reason a man out of a thing he was never reasoned into.

• Laws are like cobwebs, which may catch small flies, but let wasps and hornets break through.

• May you live all the days of your life.

• Men are happy to be laughed at for their humor, but not for their folly.

• No man was ever so completely skilled in the conduct of life, as not to receive new information from age and experience.

• Nothing is so great an example of bad manners as flattery. If you flatter all the company, you please none; If you flatter only one or two, you offend the rest.

• Nothing is so hard for those who abound in riches as to conceive how others can be in want.

• One enemy can do more hurt than ten friends can do good.

• 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.

• Politics, as the word is commonly understood, are nothing but corruptions.

• Poor nations are hungry, and rich nations are proud; and pride and hunger will ever be at variance.

• Positiveness is a good quality for preachers and speakers because, whoever shares his thoughts with the public will convince them as he himself appears convinced.

• Pretense is the overrating of any kind of knowledge we pretend to.

• Promises and pie-crust are made to be broken.

• Proper words in proper places make the true definiton of style.

• Satire is a sort of glass, wherein beholders do generally discover everybody's face but their own.

• So weak thou art that fools thy power despise; And yet so strong, thou triumph'st o'er the wise.

• The latter part of a wise person's life is occupied with curing the follies, prejudices and false opinions they contracted earlier.

• The power of fortune is confessed only by the miserable, for the happy impute all their success to prudence or merit.

• The proper words in the proper places are the true definition of style.

• The stoical scheme of supplying our wants by lopping off our desires, is like cutting off our feet when we want shoes.

• There are few wild beasts more to be dreaded than a talking man having nothing to say.

• There are few, very few, that will own themselves in a mistake.

• There is nothing in this world constant but inconstancy.

• 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.

• Vision is the art of seeing what is invisible to others.

• What they do in heaven we are ignorant of; what they do not do we are told expressly.

• When a true genius appears in this world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him.

• Where I am not understood, it shall be concluded that something very useful and profound is couched underneath.

• Where there are large powers with little ambition... nature may be said to have fallen short of her purposes.

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