Jonathan Swift Quotes

Two women seldom grow intimate but at the expense of a third person.

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.

A wise man will find us to be rogues by our faces.

Modesty may make a fool seem a man of sense.

Reason is a very light rider, and easily shook off.

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

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

Ale is meat, drink and cloth; it will make a cat speak and a wise man dumb.

In men desire begets love, and in women love begets desire.

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

A traveler's chief aim should be to make men wiser and better, and to improve their minds by the bad-as well as good example of what they deliver concerning foreign places.

The various opinions of philosophers have scattered through the world as many plagues of the mind as Pandora's box did those of the body; only with this difference, that they have not left hope at the bottom.

I remember it was with extreme difficulty that I could bring my master to understand the meaning of the word opinion, or how a point could be disputable; because reason taught us to affirm or deny only where we are certain; and beyond our knowledge we cannot do either.

I cannot but conclude that the Bulk of your Natives, to be the most pernicious Race of little odious Vermin that Nature ever suffered to crawl upon the Surface of the Earth.

You cannot reason a person out of something they were not reasoned into.

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.

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.

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

The two noblest of things, which are sweetness and light.

Let a man be ne'er so wise, he may be caught with sober lies.

In church your grandsire cut his throat; to do the job too long he tarried: he should have had my hearty vote to cut his throat before he married.

There is no vice or folly that requires so much nicety and skill to manage as vanity; nor any which by ill management makes so contemptible a figure.

Real vision is the ability to see the invisible.

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.

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

If a man would register all his opinions upon love, politics, religion, learning etc., beginning from his youth, and so go to old age, what a bundle of inconsistencies and contradictions would appear at last.

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

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

It is the first rule in oratory that a man must appear such as he would persuade others to be: and that can be accomplished only by the force of his life.

By candle-light nobody would have taken you for above five-and-twenty.

All Pretences of foretelling by Astrology, are Deceits; for this manifest Reason, because the Wise and Learned, who can only judge whether there be any Truth in this Science, do all unanimously agree to laugh at and despise it; and none but the poor ignorant Vulgar give it any Credit.

If the men of wit and genius would resolve never to complain in their works of critics and detractors, the next age would not know that they ever had any.

An excuse is a lie guarded.

It is not so much the being exempt from faults as the having overcome them that is an advantage to us; it being with the follies of the mind as with weeds of a field, which if destroyed and consumed upon the place where they grow, enrich and improve it more than if none had ever sprung there.

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

Do you think I was born in a wood to be afraid of an owl?

Nothing is so great an instance of ill-manners as flattery.

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

You can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear.

Principally I hate and detest that animal called man; although I heartily love John, Peter, Thomas, and so forth.

Ay, do despise me, I'm the prouder for it; I like to be despised.

hoever wishes to win in this game must have patience and money, since the values are so little constant and the rumors so little founded on truth Vision is the art of seeing things invisible.

Your onions should be thoroughly boiled.

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

If a lump of soot falls into the soup and you cannot conveniently get it out, stir it well in and it will give the soup a French taste.

Every dog must have his day.

Nature has left every man a capacity of being agreeable, though not of shining in company; and there are a hundred men sufficiently qualified for both who, by a very few faults, that they might correct in half an hour, are not so much as tolerable.

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