Jonathan Swift Quotes

111 company is like a dog, who dirts those most whom he loves best.

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.

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

Had Windham possessed discretion in debate, or Sheridan in conduct, they might have ruled their age.

Time is painted with a lock before, and bald behind, signifying thereby that we must take time by the forelock; for, when it is once past, there is no recalling it.

I shall be like that tree-I shall die at the top.

I used to wonder how a man of birth and spirit could endure to be wholly insignificant and obscure in a foreign country, when he might live with lustre in his own.

Liberty of conscience is nowadays only understood to be the liberty of believing what men please, but also of endeavoring to propagate that belief as much as they can.

A college joke to cure the dumps.

Hail, follow, well met, All dirty and wet: Find out, if you can, Who's master, who's man.

Seamen have a custom, when they meet a whale, to fling him out an empty tub by way of amusement, to divert him from laying violent hands upon the ship.

As learnèd commentators viewIn Homer more than Homer knew.

May you live every day of your life.

We have just enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love one another.

Gulliver describes a royal personage inspiring awe among the tiny Lilliputians because he was taller than his brethren by the breadth of a human fingernail.

Dignity high station or great riches are in some sort necessary to old men in order to keep the younger at a distance who are otherwise too apt to insult them upon the score of their age.

She looks as if butter wouldn't melt in her mouth.

That the universe was formed by a fortuitous concourse of atoms I will no more believe than that the accidental jumbling of the alphabet would fall into a most ingenious treatise of philosophy.

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

She wears her clothes as if they were thrown on her with a pitchfork.

We are so fond of each other because our ailments are the same.

Complaint is the largest tribute Heaven receives.

A man should never be ashamed to own that he has been in the wrong which is but saying ... that he is wiser today than yesterday.

There is nothing in this world constant but inconstancy.

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

111 company is like a dog who dirts those most whom he loves best.

When a true genius appears in the world you may know him by this sign that the dunces are all in confederacy against him.

What some invent the rest enlarge.

I heard the little bird say so.

Lord! I wonder what fool it was that first invented kissing.

Good manners is the art of making those people easy with whom we converse. Whoever makes the fewest persons uneasy is the best bred in the company.

Possession they say is eleven points of the law.

Tis 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.

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 by water.

Promise and pie-crust are made to be broken.

I know Sir John will go though he was sure it would rain cats and dogs.

When I am reading a book whether wise or silly it seems to me to be alive and talking to me.

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

What some invent the rest enlarge.

Very few men properly speaking live at present but are providing to live another time.

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

When men grow virtuous in their old age they only make a sacrifice to God of the devil's leavings.

The stoical scheme of supplying our wants by lopping off our desires is like cutting off our feet when we want shoes.

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

There was all the world and his wife.

Proper words in proper places make the true definition of a style.

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.

Vision is the art of seeing what is invisible to others.