Jonathan Swift Quotes

A lie is an excuse guarded

Reason is a very light rider, and easily shook off.

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

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

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

Vision is seeing the invisible.

There were many times my pants were so thin I could sit on a dime and tell if it was heads or tails.

The affectation of some late authors to introduce and multiply cant words is the most ruinous corruption in any language.

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.

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

Books, the children of the brain.

A chuck under the chin is worth two kisses.

Better belly burst than good liquor be lost.

Nothing is so great an instance of ill-manners as flattery.

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

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

Party is the madness of many for the gain of a few.

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

It is remarkable with what Christian fortitude and resignation we can bear the suffering of other folks.

It is the folly of too many to mistake the echo of a London coffee-house for the voice of the kingdom.

So endless and exorbitant are the desires of men that they will grasp at all, and can form no scheme of perfect happiness with less.

Those dreams that on the silent night intrude, and with false flitting shapes our minds delude ... are mere productions of the brain. And fools consult interpreters in vain.

If a lump of soot falls into the soup and you cannot conveniently get it out, stir it well in and it will give the soup a French taste.

Modesty may make a fool seem a man of sense.

There seems to be no part of knowledge in fewer hands than that of discerning when to have done.

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

Hereditary right should be kept sacred, not from any inalienable right in a particular family, but to avoid the consequences that usually attend the ambition of competitors.

Do you think I was born in a wood to be afraid of an owl?

Religion supposed Heaven and Hell, the word of God, and sacraments, and twenty other circumstances which, taken seriously, are a wonderful check to wit and humour.

I have always a sacred veneration for anyone I observe to be a little out of repair in his person, as supposing him either a poet or a philosopher.

The lack of belief is a defect that ought to be concealed when it cannot be overcome.

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

Vanity is a natural object of temptation to a woman.

All panegyrics are mingled with an infusion of poppy.

Kitchen Physic is the best Physic.

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.

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.

An idle reason lessens the weight of the good ones you gave before.

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

Men always grow vicious before they become unbelievers.

Then, rising with Aurora's light, The Muse invoked, sit down to write; Blot out, correct, insert, refine, Enlarge, diminish, interline.

What religion is he of? Why, he is an Anythingarian.

Brisk talkers are generally slow thinkers.

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.

The system of morality to be gathered from the ancient sages falls very short of that delivered in the gospel.

Observation is an old man's memory.

Love of flattery, in most men, proceeds from the mean opinion they have of themselves; in women, from the contrary.

So, naturalists observe, a flea; Hath smaller fleas that on him prey; And these have smaller fleas to bite 'em, And so proceed ad infinitum.

I forget whether advice be among the lost things which Ariosto says are to be found in the moon: that and time ought to have been there.

Flattery is the worst and falsest way of showing our esteem.