Top 438 Quotes & Sayings by Jonathan Swift - Page 5

Praise is the daughter of present power.

No man of honor, as the word is usually understood, did ever pretend that his honor obliged him to be chaste or temperate, to pay his creditors, to be useful to his country, to do good to mankind, to endeavor to be wise or learned, to regard his word, his promise, or his oath.

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.

Brisk talkers are usually slow thinkers. There is, indeed, no wild beast more to be dreaded than a communicative man having nothing to communicate. If you are civil to the voluble they will abuse your patience; if brusque, your character.

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

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

All human race would be wits. And millions miss, for one that hits.

Pray steal me not, I'm Mrs. Dingley's, Whose heart in this four-footed thing lies.

That was excellently observed’, say I, when I read a passage in an author, where his opinion agrees with mine. When we differ, there I pronounce him to be mistaken.

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

Hail fellow, well met.

In all assemblies, though you wedge them ever so close, we may observe this peculiar property, that over their heads there is room enough; but how to reach it is the difficult point. To this end the philosopher's way in all ages has been by erecting certain edifices in the air.

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.

Come hither, all ye empty things, Ye bubbles rais'd by breath of Kings; Who float upon the tide of state, Come hither, and behold your fate. Let pride be taught by this rebuke, How very mean a thing's a Duke; From all his ill-got honours flung, Turn'd to that dirt from whence he sprung.

Common fluency of speech in many men and most women is owing to a scarcity of matter.

T is as cheap sitting as standing.

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

Hobbes clearly proves, that every creature Lives in a state of war by nature.

The preaching of divines helps to preserve well-inclined men in the course of virtue, but seldom or ever reclaims the vicious.

Arbitrary power is but the first natural step from anarchy, or the savage life.

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.

Atlas, we read in ancient song, Was so exceeding tall and strong, He bore the skies upon his back, Just as the pedler does his pack; But, as the pedler overpress'd Unloads upon a stall to rest, Or, when he can no longer stand, Desires a friend to lend a hand, So Atlas, lest the ponderous spheres Should sink, and fall about his ears, Got Hercules to bear the pile, That he might sit and rest awhile.

There is no talent so useful toward rising in the world, or which puts men more out of the reach of fortune, than that quality generally possessed by the dullest sort of men, and in common speech called discretion; a species of lower prudence, by the assistance of which, people of the meanest intellectuals, without any other qualification, pass through the world in great tranquillity, and with universal good treatment, neither giving nor taking offence.

All fits of pleasure are balanced by an equal degree of pain or languor; it is like spending this year part of the next year's revenue.

I would rather be a freeman among slaves than a slave among freemen.

I cannot imagine why we should be at the expense to furnish wit for succeeding ages, when the former have made no sort of provision for ours.

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.

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.

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

Have you not observed that there is a lower kind of discretion and regularity, which seldom fails of raising men to the highest station in the court, the church, and the law?

When any one person or body of men seize into their hands the power in the last resort, there is properly no longer a government, but what Aristotle and his followers call the abuse and corruption of one.

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.

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

Rhetoric in serious discourses is like the flowers in corn; pleasing to those who come only for amusement, but prejudicial to him who would reap profit from it.

A little grain of the romance is no ill ingredient to preserve and exalt the dignity of human nature, without which it is apt to degenerate into everything that is sordid, vicious and low.

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.

Nothing more unqualified the man to act with prudence than a misfortune that is attended with shame and guilt.

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.

The axe of intemperance has lopped off his green boughs and left him a withered trunk.

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.

Tis nothing when you are used to it.

Perpetual aiming at wit is a very bad part of conversation. It is done to support a character: it generally fails; it is a sort of insult on the company, and a restraint upon the speaker.

For, if we take an examination of what is generally understood by happiness, as it has respect either to the understanding or the senses, we shall find all its properties and adjuncts will herd under this short definition: that it is a perpetual possession of being well deceived.

An atheist has got one point beyond the devil.

She wears her clothes as if they were thrown on with a pitchfork.

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.

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

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.

There is no quality so contrary to any nature which one cannot affect, and put on upon occasion, in order to serve an interest.

When you set about your composing, it may be necessary for your ease, and better distillation of wit, to put on your worst clothes, and the worse the better; for an author, like a limbeck, will yield the better for having a rag about him: besides that, I have observed a gardener cut the outward rind of a tree (which is the surtout of it) to make it bear well; and this is a natural account of the usual poverty of poets, and is an argument why wits, of all men living, ought to be ill clad.

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

Under the rose, since here are none but friends, To own the truth we have some private ends.

Unjustly poets we asperse: Truth shines the brighter clad in verse, And all the fictions they pursue Do but insinuate what is true.

There seems to be no part of knowledge in fewer hands than that of discerning when to have done.

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

Ah, a German and a genius ! A prodigy, admit him !

It is with wits as with razors, which are never so apt to cut those they are employed on as when they have lost their edge.

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.

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.

Modesty may make a fool seem a man of sense.