Swift, Jonathan (Jonathan Swift)

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

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.
-- Jonathan Swift

A tavern is a place where madness is sold by the bottle.
-- Jonathan Swift

Although men are accused of not knowing their own weakness, yet perhaps few know their own strength. It is in men as in soils, where sometimes there is a vein of gold which the owner knows not of.
-- Jonathan Swift

Ambition often puts men upon doing the meanest offices; so climbing is performed in the same posture with creeping.
-- Jonathan Swift

As blushing will sometimes make a whore pass for a virtuous woman, so modesty may make a fool seem a man of sense.
-- Jonathan Swift

As love without esteem is capricious and volatile; esteem without love is languid and cold.
-- Jonathan Swift

Blessed is he who expects nothing, for he shall never be disappointed.
-- Jonathan Swift

Books, the children of the brain.
-- Jonathan Swift

Censure is the tax a man pays to the public for being eminent.
-- Jonathan Swift

For in reason, all government without the consent of the governed is the very definition of slavery.
-- Jonathan Swift

Fine words! I wonder where you stole them?
-- Jonathan Swift

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.
-- Jonathan Swift

He was a bold man that first ate an oyster.
-- Jonathan Swift

I never wonder to see men wicked, but I often wonder to see them not ashamed.
-- Jonathan Swift

I've always believed no matter how many shots I miss, I'm going to make the next one.
-- Jonathan Swift

Interest is the spur of the people, but glory that of great souls. Invention is the talent of youth, and judgment of age.
-- Jonathan Swift

It is impossible that anything so natural, so necessary, and so universal as death, should ever have been designed by providence as an evil to mankind.
-- Jonathan Swift

It is useless to attempt to reason a man out of a thing he was never reasoned into.
-- Jonathan Swift

Laws are like cobwebs, which may catch small flies, but let wasps and hornets break through.
-- Jonathan Swift

May you live all the days of your life.
-- Jonathan Swift

Men are happy to be laughed at for their humor, but not for their folly.
-- Jonathan Swift

No man was ever so completely skilled in the conduct of life, as not to receive new information from age and experience.
-- 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.
-- Jonathan Swift

Nothing is so hard for those who abound in riches as to conceive how others can be in want.
-- Jonathan Swift

One enemy can do more hurt than ten friends can do good.
-- Jonathan Swift

One of the best rules in conversation is, never to say a thing which any of the company can reasonably wish had been left unsaid.
-- Jonathan Swift

Politics, as the word is commonly understood, are nothing but corruptions.
-- Jonathan Swift

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

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.
-- Jonathan Swift

Pretense is the overrating of any kind of knowledge we pretend to.
-- Jonathan Swift

Promises and pie-crust are made to be broken.
-- Jonathan Swift

Proper words in proper places make the true definiton of style.
-- Jonathan Swift

Satire is a sort of glass, wherein beholders do generally discover everybody's face but their own.
-- Jonathan Swift

So weak thou art that fools thy power despise; And yet so strong, thou triumph'st o'er the wise.
-- Jonathan Swift

The latter part of a wise person's life is occupied with curing the follies, prejudices and false opinions they contracted earlier.
-- Jonathan Swift

The power of fortune is confessed only by the miserable, for the happy impute all their success to prudence or merit.
-- Jonathan Swift

The proper words in the proper places are the true definition of style.
-- Jonathan Swift

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

There are few wild beasts more to be dreaded than a talking man having nothing to say.
-- Jonathan Swift

There are few, very few, that will own themselves in a mistake.
-- Jonathan Swift

There is nothing in this world constant but inconstancy.
-- Jonathan Swift

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.
-- Jonathan Swift

Vision is the art of seeing what is invisible to others.
-- Jonathan Swift

What they do in heaven we are ignorant of; what they do not do we are told expressly.
-- Jonathan Swift

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

Where I am not understood, it shall be concluded that something very useful and profound is couched underneath.
-- Jonathan Swift

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

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

-- Jonathan Swift

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

Laws are like cobwebs, which may catch small flies, but let wasps and hornets break through.
-- Jonathan Swift