Jonathan Swift quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Jonathan Swift

Jonathan Swift Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Jonathan Swift on Wise Famous Quotes.

and the first words I learnt, were to express my desire "that he would please give me my liberty;" which I every day repeated on my knees. His

There is no vice which humankind carries to such wild extremes as that of avarice.

You should never be ashamed to admit you have been wrong. It only proves you are wiser today than yesterday

The worthiest people are the most injured by slander, as is the best fruit which the birds have been pecking at.

All fits of pleasure are balanced by an equal degree of pain and languor; it's like spending this year part of next year's revenue.

Though fear should lend him pinions like the wind, yet swifter fate will seize him from behind.

He that calls a man ungrateful sums up all the veil that a man can be guilty of.

May you live every day of your life.

There is nothing constant in this world but inconsistency.

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 ...

Lord, Madame, I have fed like a farmer; I shall grow as fat as a porpoise.

All human race would be wits. And millions miss, for one that hits.

The first springs of great events, like those of great rivers, are often mean and little.

If a man makes me keep my distance, the comfort is, he keeps his at the same time.

And, is not Virtue in Mankind
The Nutriment that feeds the Mind?

When I am in danger of bursting, I will go and whisper among the reeds.

I love white Portugal wine better than claret, champagne, or burgundy. I have a sad vulgar appetite.

A wise man is never less alone than when he is alone.

One principal object of good-breeding is to suit our behaviour to the three several degrees of men, our superiors, our equals, and those below us.

Let a man be ne'er so wise, he may be caught with sober lies.

We of this age have discovered a shorter, and more prudent method to become scholars and wits, without the fatigue of reading or of thinking.

Men of wit, learning and virtue might strike out every offensive or unbecoming passage from plays.

Real vision is the ability to see the invisible.

Some dire misfortune to portend, no enemy can match a friend.

They say fingers were made before forks, and hands before knives.

Ever eating, never cloying, All-devouring, all-destroying Never finding full repast, Till I eat the world at last.

Say, Britain, could you ever boast, Three poets in an age at most? Our chilling climate hardly bears A sprig of bays in fifty years.

No wise man ever wished to be younger.

'T is an old maxim in the schools, That flattery 's the food of fools; Yet now and then your men of wit Will condescend to take a bit.

Where Young must torture his invention To flatter knaves, or lose his pension.

A wise man will find us to be rogues by our faces.

Usually speaking, the worst-bred person in company is a young traveller just returned from abroad.

Apollo was held the god of physic and sender of disease. Both were originally the same trade, and still continue.

It is the talent of human nature to run from one extreme to another.

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

There is no vice or folly that requires so much nicety and skill to manage as vanity; nor any which by ill management makes so contemptible a figure.

Complaint is the largest tribute heaven receives and the sincerest part of our devotion.

Hobbes clearly proves, that every creature Lives in a state of war by nature.

We have an intuitive sense of our duty.

Tis nothing when you are used to it.

He was a fiddler, and consequently a rogue.

Observation is an old man's memory.

"Lawyers Are": Those whose interests and abilities lie in perverting, confounding and eluding the law.

The bulk of mankind is as well equipped for flying as thinking.

Ay, do despise me, I'm the prouder for it; I like to be despised.

From not the gravest of Divines,
Accept for once some serious Lines.

T is as cheap sitting as standing.

That incessant envy wherewith the common rate of mankind pursues all superior natures to their own.

I row after health like a waterman ...

It is a miserable thing to live in suspense; it is the life of the spider.

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

There is nothing in this world constant, but inconstancy.

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

I won't quarrel with my bread and butter.

Arbitrary power is but the first natural step from anarchy, or the savage life.

It may pass for a maxim in State, that the administration cannot be placed in too few hands, nor the legislature in too many.

Polite Conversation Why, everyone one as they like; as the good woman said when she kissed her cow.

Human brutes, like other beasts, find snares and poison in the provision of life, and are allured by their appetites to their destruction.

He was a bold man that first ate an oyster.

She watches him as a cat would watch a mouse.

A college joke to cure the dumps.

Truth shines the brighter clad in verse.

I would rather be a freeman among slaves than a slave among freemen.

I must complain the cards are ill shuffled till I have a good hand.

Pedantry is properly the over-rating of any kind of knowledge we pretend to.

Live every day as your last, because one of these days, it will be.

It often happens that, if a lie be believed only for an hour, it has done its work, and there is no further occasion for it.

An English tongue, if refined to a certain standard, might perhaps be fixed forever.

Undoubtedly, philosophers are in the right when they tell us that nothing is great or little otherwise than by comparison.

A carpenter is known by his chips.

All disgracers of the press in prose and verse condemned to eat nothing but their own cotton, and quench their thirst with their own ink.

The example alone of a vicious prince will corrupt an age; but that of a good one will not reform it.

To acknowledge you were wrong yesterday is simply to let the world know that you are wiser today than you were then.

If you were not reasoned into your beliefs, you cannot be reasoned out of them.

A favor is half granted, when graciously refused.

Bread is the staff of life.

Most sorts of diversion in men, children and other animals, are in imitation of fighting.

Quotations are best brought in to confirm some opinion controverted.

You cannot reason a person out of a position he did not reason himself into in the first place.

Good manners is the art of making people comfortable. Whoever makes the fewest people uncomfortable has the best manners.

It is very unfair in any writer to employ ignorance and malice together, because it gives his answerer double work.

Philosophy! the lumber of the schools.

A wise man should have money in his head, but not in his heart.

An atheist has got one point beyond the devil.

It is in men as in soils where sometimes there is a vein of gold which the owner knows not.

Some men, under the notion of weeding out prejudice, eradicate virtue, honesty and religion.

Silks, velvets, calicoes, and the whole lexicon of female fopperies.

truth, justice, temperance, and

The tiny Lilliputians surmise that Gulliver's watch may be his god, because it is that which, he admits, he seldom does anything without consulting.

If the world had but a dozen Arbuthnots I would burn my [Gulliver's] Travels.

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

Venus, a beautiful, good-natured lady, was the goddess of love; Juno, a terrible shrew, the goddess of marriage: and they were always mortal enemies.

I'll give you leave to call me anything, if you don't call me spade.

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.

that Providence never intended to make the management of public affairs a mystery to be comprehended only by a few persons of sublime genius, of

A pleasant companion is as good as a coach.

Everyone desires long life, not one old age.

Though Diogenes lived in a tub, there might be, for aught I know, as much pride under his rags, as in the fine-spun garments of the divine Plato.

All panegyrics are mingled with an infusion of poppy.

Invention is the talent of youth, as judgment is of age.