Jonathan Swift Quotes

A favor is half granted, when graciously refused.

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

Old sciences are unraveled like old stockings, by beginning at the foot.

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

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

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.

Some men, under the notion of weeding out prejudice, eradicate virtue, honesty and religion.

A lie is an excuse guarded

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.

The greatest Inventions were produced in Times of Ignorance; as the Use of the Compass, Gunpowder, and Printing; and by the dullest Nation, as the Germans.

The tiny Lilliputians surmise that Gulliver's watch may be his god, because it is that which, he admits, he seldom does anything without consulting.

Abstracts, abridgments, summaries, etc., have the same use with burning-glasses,--to collect the diffused light rays of wit and learning in authors, and make them point with warmth and quickness upon the reader's imagination.

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

It is in disputes as in armies, where the weaker side sets up false lights, and makes a great noise, to make the enemy believe them more numerous and strong than they really are.

Fools are apt to imitate only the defects of their betters.

It is very unfair in any writer to employ ignorance and malice together, because it gives his answerer double work.

Men always grow vicious before they become unbelievers.

Small causes are sufficient to make a man uneasy, when great ones are not in the way: for want of a block he will stumble at a straw.

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

There are but three ways for a man to revenge himself of the censure of the world,--to despise it, to return the like, or to endeavor to live so as to avoid it; the first of these is usually pretended, the last is almost impossible, the universal practice is for the second.

Books, the children of the brain.

I never saw, heard, nor read, that the clergy were beloved in any nation where Christianity was the religion of the country. Nothing can render them popular, but some degree of persecution.

That incessant envy wherewith the common rate of mankind pursues all superior natures to their own.

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

Imaginary evils soon become real ones by indulging our reflections on them; as he who in a melancholy fancy sees something like a face on the wall or the wainscot can, by two or three touches with a lead pencil, make it look visible, and agreeing with what he fancied.

Nor do they trust their tongue alone, but speak a language of their own; can read a nod, a shrug, a look, far better than a printed book; convey a libel in a frown, and wink a reputation down.

Conscience signifies that knowledge which a man hath of his own thoughts and actions; and because, if a man judgeth fairly of his actions by comparing them with the law of God, his mind will approve or condemn him; this knowledge or conscience may be both an accuser and a judge.

A chuck under the chin is worth two kisses.

The scholars of Ireland seem not to have the least conception of style, but run on in a flat phraseology, often mingled with barbarous terms.

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

Just get the right syllable in the proper place.

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.

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.

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

Kitchen Physic is the best Physic.

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.

My father had a small Estate in Nottinghamshire; I was the Third of five Sons.

Observation is an old man's memory.

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.

Neither is it safe to count upon the weakness of any man's understanding, who is thoroughly possessed of the spirit of revenge to sharpen his invention.

So geographers, in Africa maps, With savage pictures fill their gaps, And o'er uninhabitable downs Place elephants for want of towns

He was a fiddler, and consequently a rogue.

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

Life is a tragedy wherein we sit as spectators for a while and then act our part in it.

There is nothing constant in this world but inconsistency.

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

Religion seems to have grown an infant with age, and requires miracles to nurse it, as it had in its infancy.

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