Jonathan Swift Quotes

Your notions of friendship are new to me; I believe every man is born with his quantum, and he cannot give to one without robbing another. I very well know to whom I would give the first place in my friendship, but they are not in the way, I am condemned to another scene, and therefore I distribute it in pennyworths to those about me, and who displease me least, and should do the same to my fellow prisoners if I were condemned to a jail.

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

A footman may swear; but he cannot swear like a lord. He can swear as often: but can he swear with equal delicacy, propriety, and judgment?

Great abilities, when employed as God directs, do but make the owners of them greater and more painful servants to their neighbors.

Whatever the poets pretend, it is plain they give immortality to none but themselves; it is Homer and Virgil we reverence and admire, not Achilles or Aeneas. With historians it is quite the contrary; our thoughts are taken up with the actions, persons, and events we read, and we little regard the authors.

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

When a real genius appeares in this world, you'll know him by the fact that all the fools have allied against him.

Pride, ill nature, and want of sense are the three great sources of ill manners; without some one of these defects, no man will behave himself ill for want of experience, or what, in the language of fools, is called knowing the world.

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

There is no vice which mankind carries to such wild extremes as that of avarice.

May you live all the days of your life.

Fine words! I wonder where you stole them.

Satire is a sort of glass wherein beholders do generally discover everybody’s face but their own; which is the chief reason for that kind reception it meets with in the world, and that so very few are offended with it.

The best doctors in the world are Doctor Diet, Doctor Quiet, and Doctor Merryman.

I hope you will be ready to own publicly, whenever you shall be called to it, that by your great and frequent urgency you prevailed on me to publish a very loose and uncorrect account of my travels, with directions to hire some young gentleman of either university to put them in order, and correct the style, as my cousin Dampier did, by my advice, in his book called "A Voyage round the world."

Simplicity, without which no human performance can arrive at perfection.

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.

The most ignorant person, at a reasonable charge, and with a little bodily labour, might write books in philosophy, poetry, politics, laws, mathematics, and theology, without the least assistance from genius or study.

Perverseness is your whole defence.

I won't quarrel with my bread and butter.

She watches him as a cat would watch a mouse.

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.

A secret is seldom safe in more than one breast.

I will venture to affirm, that the three seasons wherein our corn has miscarried did no more contribute to our present misery, than one spoonful of water thrown upon a rat already drowned would contribute to his death; and that the present plentiful harvest, although it should be followed by a dozen ensuing, would no more restore us, than it would the rat aforesaid to put him near the fire, which might indeed warm his fur-coat, but never bring him back to life.

All panegyrics are mingled with an infusion of poppy.

I never knew a man come to greatness or eminence who lay abed late in the morning.

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

For the rest, whatever we have got has been by infinite labor, and search, and ranging through every corner of nature; the difference is that instead of dirt and poison, we have rather chosen to fill our hives with honey and wax, thus furnishing mankind with the two noblest of things, which are sweetness and light.

... the atheists, libertines, despisers of religion ... that is to say all those who usually pass under the name of Free-thinkers.

I have ever hated all nations, professions, and communities, and all my love is toward individuals.

If a man makes me keep my distance, the comfort is, he keeps his at the same time.

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.

Neither are any wars so furious and bloody, or of so long continuance as those occasioned by difference in opinion, especially if it be in things indifferent.

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.

Wisdom is a fox who, after long hunting, will at last cost you the pains to dig out; it is a cheese, which, by how much the richer, has the thicker, the homlier, and the coarser coat; and whereof to a judicious palate, the maggots are best. It is a sack posset, wherein the deeper you go, you'll find it the sweeter. Wisdom is a hen, whose cackling we must value and consider, because it is attended with an egg. But lastly, it is a nut, which, unless you choose with judgment, may cost you a tooth, and pay you with nothing but a worm.

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

Praise is the daughter of present power.

He was a bold man that first ate an oyster.

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

Big-endians and small-endians.

This single Stick, which you now behold ingloriously lying in that neglected Corner, I once knew in a flourishing State in a Forest: It was full of Sap, full of Leaves, and full of Boughs: But now, in vain does the busy Art of Man pretend to vie with Nature, by tying that withered Bundle of Twigs to its sapless Trunk: It is at best but the Reverse of what it was; a Tree turned upside down, the Branches on the Earth, and the Root in the Air.

Daphne knows, with equal ease, How to vex and how to please; But the folly of her sex Makes her sole delight to vex.

I said there was a society of men among us, bred up from their youth in the art of proving by words multiplied for the purpose, that white is black, and black is white, according as they are paid. To this society all the rest of the people are as slaves.

You should never be ashamed to admit you have been wrong. It only proves you are wiser today than yesterday

My horses understand me tolerably well; I converse with them at least four hours every day. They are strangers to bridle or saddle; they live in great amity with me, and friendship of each other.

He had been eight years upon a project for extracting sunbeams out of cucumbers, which were to be put into vials hermetically sealed, and let out to warm the air in raw, inclement summers.

It may pass for a maxim in State, that the administration cannot be placed in too few hands, nor the legislature in too many.

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