Jonathan Swift Quotes

A college joke to cure the dumps.

The worthiest people are the most injured by slander, as is the best fruit which the birds have been pecking at.

Wise people are never less alone than when they are alone.

A stander-by may sometimes, perhaps, see more of the game than he that plays it.

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

Story-telling is subject to two unavoidable defects,--frequent repetition and being soon exhausted; so that, whoever values this gift in himself, has need of a good memory, and ought frequently to shift his company.

Falsehood flies, and the truth comes limping after it.

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

It is in men as in soils where sometimes there is a vein of gold which the owner knows not.

Every age might perhaps produce one or two geniuses, if they were not sunk under the censure and obloquy of plodding, servile, imitating pedants.

Apollo was held the god of physic and sender of disease. Both were originally the same trade, and still continue.

A poor spirit is poorer than a poor purse. A very few pounds a year would ease a man of the scandal of avarice.

The bulk of mankind is as well equipped for flying as thinking.

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.

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

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 water.

Few are qualified to shine in company, but it is in most men's power to be agreeable.

Men of great parts are often unfortunate in the management of public business, because they are apt to go out of the common road by the quickness of their imagination.

Vision is seeing the invisible.

A ridiculous passion which hath no being but in play-books and romances.

Coffee makes us severe, and grave and philosophical.

A carpenter is known by his chips.

I must complain the cards are ill shuffled till I have a good hand.

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

War: that mad game the world so loves to play.

Bread is the staff of life.

A lie does not consist in the indirect position of words, but in the desire and intention, by false speaking, to deceive and injure your neighbour.

The ruin of a State is generally preceded by an universal degeneracy of manners and contempt of religion.

A fig for partridges and quails, ye dainties I know nothing of ye; But on the highest mount in Wales Would choose in peace to drink my coffee.

For want of a block, man will stumble at a straw.

There's none so blind as they that won't see.

My hunger serves me instead of a clock.

The best Maxim I know in this life is, to drink your Coffee when you can, and when you cannot, to be easy without it.

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

It is the talent of human nature to run from one extreme to another.

Vanity is a natural object of temptation to a woman.

What some people invent the rest enlarge.

This wine should be eaten, it is too good to be drunk.