Top 438 Quotes & Sayings by Jonathan Swift

Explore popular quotes and sayings by an Irish writer Jonathan Swift.

Last updated on April 14, 2025.

Jonathan Swift was an Anglo-Irish satirist, author, essayist, political pamphleteer, poet, and Anglican cleric who became Dean of St Patrick's Cathedral, Dublin, hence his common sobriquet, "Dean Swift".

Irish - Writer | November 30, 1667 - October 19, 1745

Source: Wikipedia

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

Jonathan Swift

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

Jonathan Swift

He was a bold man that first ate an oyster.

Jonathan Swift

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

Jonathan Swift

A wise person should have money in their head, but not in their heart.

Jonathan Swift

When a true genius appears, you can know him by this sign: that all the dunces are in a confederacy against him.

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

No wise man ever wished to be younger.

Jonathan Swift

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

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

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

Jonathan Swift

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

Jonathan Swift

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.

Jonathan Swift

Observation is an old man's memory.

Jonathan Swift

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

Jonathan Swift

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

Jonathan Swift

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

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

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

Jonathan Swift

Books, the children of the brain.

Jonathan Swift

I wonder what fool it was that first invented kissing.

Jonathan Swift

If Heaven had looked upon riches to be a valuable thing, it would not have given them to such a scoundrel.

Jonathan Swift

Every man desires to live long, but no man wishes to be old.

Jonathan Swift

Power is no blessing in itself, except when it is used to protect the innocent.

Jonathan Swift

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

Jonathan Swift

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

Jonathan Swift

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

Jonathan Swift

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

Jonathan Swift

There is nothing constant in this world but inconsistency.

Jonathan Swift

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

Jonathan Swift

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

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

Every dog must have his day.

Jonathan Swift

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

Jonathan Swift

Vanity is a mark of humility rather than of pride.

Jonathan Swift

It is a maxim among these lawyers, that whatever hath been done before, may legally be done again: and therefore they take special care to record all the decisions formerly made against common justice and the general reason of mankind.

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

Invention is the talent of youth, as judgment is of age.

Jonathan Swift

We are so fond on one another because our ailments are the same.

Jonathan Swift

Words are but wind; and learning is nothing but words; ergo, learning is nothing but wind.

Jonathan Swift

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.

Jonathan Swift

One enemy can do more hurt than ten friends can do good.

Jonathan Swift

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

Jonathan Swift

May you live all the days of your life.

Jonathan Swift

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

Jonathan Swift

A wise man should have money in his head, but not in his heart.

Jonathan Swift

He was a fiddler, and consequently a rogue.

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