Quotes by Jonathan Swift
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.
Most sorts of diversion in men, children and other animals, are in imitation of fighting.
For in reason, all government without the consent of the governed is the very definition of slavery.
Nor do they trust their tongue alone, but speak a language of their own; can read a nod, a shrug, a look, far better than a printed book; convey a libel in a frown, and wink a reputation down.
Where I am not understood, it shall be concluded that something very useful and profound is couched underneath.
Politics, as the word is commonly understood, are nothing but corruptions.
No man was ever so completely skilled in the conduct of life, as not to receive new information from age and experience.
She wears her clothes as if they were thrown on with a pitch folk.
Satire is a sort of glass, wherein beholders do generally discover everybody's face but their own.
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.
He was a fiddler, and consequently a rogue.
Men are happy to be laughed at for their humor, but not for their folly.
What they do in heaven we are ignorant of; what they do not do we are told expressly.
Human brutes, like other beasts, find snares and poison in the provision of life, and are allured by their appetites to their destruction.
Pretense is the overrating of any kind of knowledge we pretend to.
So weak thou art that fools thy power despise; And yet so strong, thou triumph'st o'er the wise.
We have just enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love one another.
Books, the children of the brain.
May you live every day of your life.
He was a bold man that first eat on oyster.
Don't set your wit against a child.
Nothing is so hard for those who abound in riches as to conceive how others can be in want.
Interest is the spur of the people, but glory that of great souls. Invention is the talent of youth, and judgment of age.
The power of fortune is confessed only by the miserable, for the happy impute all their success to prudence or merit.
Blessed is he who expects nothing, for he shall never be disappointed.
