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Jonathan Swift (1667 – 1745)


Irish writer and satirist.
Jonathan Swift
Bread is the staff of life.
Swift quotes
Fingers were made before forks, and hands before knives.
Swift
Every man desires to live long, but no man would be old.




Swift Jonathan quotes
There was all the world and his wife.
Swift Jonathan
There are few, very few, that will own themselves in a mistake, though all the World sees them to be in downright nonsense.
Jonathan Swift quotes
And surely one of the best rules in conversation is, never to say a thing which any of the company can reasonably wish had been left unsaid…
Jonathan Swift
I shall be like that tree; I shall die from the top.
Swift Jonathan quotes
Politics, as the word is commonly understood, are nothing but corruptions, and consequently of no use to a good king or a good ministry; for which reason Courts are so overrun with politics.
Swift
I never wonder to see men wicked, but I often wonder to see them not ashamed.
Swift Jonathan
He had been eight years upon a project for extracting sunbeams out of cucumbers, which were to be put in vials hermetically sealed, and let out to warm the air in raw inclement summers.
Jonathan Swift
…one enemy can do more hurt, than ten friends can do good.




Jonathan Swift quotes
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.
Jonathan Swift
It is useless to attempt to reason a man out of a thing he was never reasoned into.
Swift quotes
There is nothing in this world constant, but inconstancy.
Swift Jonathan
As boys do sparrows, with flinging salt upon their tails.
Swift Jonathan quotes
I told him...that we ate when we were not hungry, and drank without the provocation of thirst.
Jonathan Swift
Libertas et natale solum:
Fine words! I wonder where you stole 'em.
Jonathan Swift quotes
She's no chicken; she's on the wrong side of thirty, if she be a day.
Jonathan Swift
I have one word to say upon the subject of profound writers, who are grown very numerous of late; and I know very well the judicious world is resolved to list me in that number. I conceive therefore, as to the business of being profound, that it is with writers as with wells - a person with good eyes may see to the bottom of the deepest, provided any water be there: and often when there is nothing in the world at the bottom besides dryness and dirt, though it be but a yard and a-half under-ground, it shall pass, however, for wondrous deep upon no wiser reason than because it is wondrous dark
Swift Jonathan
The Bulk of mankind is as well equipped for flying as thinking.


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