Jonathan Swift Quotes
Top 100 wise famous quotes and sayings 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
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.
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 ...
I love white Portugal wine better than claret, champagne, or burgundy. I have a sad vulgar appetite.
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.
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.
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.
'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.
Apollo was held the god of physic and sender of disease. Both were originally the same trade, and still continue.
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.
"Lawyers Are": Those whose interests and abilities lie in perverting, confounding and eluding the law.
It may pass for a maxim in State, that the administration cannot be placed in too few hands, nor the legislature in too many.
Human brutes, like other beasts, find snares and poison in the provision of life, and are allured by their appetites to their destruction.
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.
Undoubtedly, philosophers are in the right when they tell us that nothing is great or little otherwise than by comparison.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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