Jonathan Swift Quotes

T is as cheap sitting as standing.

It is a maxim, that those, to whom everybody allows the second place, have an undoubted title to the first.

When we desire or solicit anything, our minds run wholly on the good side or circumstances of it; when it is obtained, our minds run wholly on the bad ones.

An atheist has got one point beyond the devil.

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

Everybody wants to live forever, but nobody wants to grow old.

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

O Grub Street! how do I bemoan thee, whose graceless children scorn to own thee! . Yet thou hast greater cause to be ashamed of them, than they of thee.

The more careless, the more modish.

I am convinced that if the virtuosi could once find out a world in the moon, with a passage to it, our women would wear nothing but what directly came from thence.

A little grain of the romance is no ill ingredient to preserve and exalt the dignity of human nature, without which it is apt to degenerate into everything that is sordid, vicious and low.

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

Unjustly poets we asperse: Truth shines the brighter clad in verse, And all the fictions they pursue Do but insinuate what is true.

No preacher is listened to but time, which gives us the same train and turn of thought that elder people have in vain tried to put into our heads before.

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

The preaching of divines helps to preserve well-inclined men in the course of virtue, but seldom or ever reclaims the vicious.

Surely mortal man is a broomstick!

Men of great parts are often unfortunate in the management of public business, because they are apt to go out of the common road by the quickness of their imagination.

Brutes find out where their talents lie; a bear will not attempt to fly.

Common fluency of speech in many men and most women is owing to a scarcity of matter.

When a man of genius appears in the world, it is immediately recognized by the fact that all the blockheads join forces against him.

Would a writer know how to behave himself with relation td posterity? Let him consider in old books what he finds that he is glad to know, and what omissions he most laments.

God hath intended our passions to prevail over reason.

I can discover no political evil in suffering bullies, sharpers, and rakes, to rid the world of each other by a method of their own; where the law hath not been able to find an expedient.

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

I have heard of a man who had a mind to sell his house, and therefore carried a piece of brick in his pocket, which he shewed as a pattern to encourage purchasers.

Politics, as the word is commonly understood, are nothing but corruptions, and consequently of no use to a good king or a good ministry; for which reason Courts are so overrun with politics.

Come, agree, the law's costly.

I row after health like a waterman.

I always love to begin a journey on Sundays, because I shall have the prayers of the church to preserve all that travel by land, or water.

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

For want of a block, man will stumble at a straw.

This wine should be eaten, it is too good to be drunk.

With a whirl of thought oppressed I sink from reverie to rest. An horrid vision seized my head, I saw the graves give up their dead.

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

I with borrow'd silver shine, What you see is none of mine. First I show you but a quarter, Like the bow that guards the Tartar: Then the half, and then the whole, Ever dancing round the pole.

When a man is made a spiritual peer he loses his surname; when a temporal, his Christian name.

She 's no chicken; she 's on the wrong side of thirty, if she be a day.

Orators inflame the people, whose anger is really but a short fit of madness.

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

If the world had but a dozen Arbuthnots in it, I would burn my Travels.

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.

Lose no time to contradict her, Nor endeavor to convict her; Only take this rule along, Always to advise her wrong, And reprove her when she's right; She may then grow wise for spite.

If a man will observe as he walks the streets, I believe he will find the merriest countenances in mourning coaches.

Careful observers may foretell the hour (By sure prognostics) when to dread a show'r. While rain depends, the pensive cat gives o'er Her frolics, and pursues her tail no more.

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

An intelligent person should put money in the beginning, but not in heart

Last week I saw a woman flayed, and you will hardly believe, how much it altered her person for the worse.

A fig for your bill of fare; show me your bill of company.

Big-endians and small-endians.