Jonathan Swift (1667 – 1745)
Irish writer and satirist.
Invention is the talent of youth, and judgment of age…
Vision is the art of seeing things invisible.
Although men are accused of not knowing their own weakness, yet perhaps as 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.
He made it a part of his religion never to say grace to his meat.
There is, indeed, no wild beast more to be dreaded than a communicative man having nothing to communicate.
Satire is a sort of glass, wherein beholders do generally discover everybody's face but their own.
Pedantry is properly the over-rating of any kind of knowledge we pretend to.
Yet malice never was his aim;
He lashed the vice but spared the name.
No individual could resent,
Where thousands equally were meant.
His satire points at no defect
But what all mortals may correct;
For he abhorred that senseless tribe
Who call it humor when they gibe.
A nice man is a man of nasty ideas.
When I behold this I sighed, and said within myself, "Surely mortal man is a broomstick!" Nature sent him into the world strong and lusty, in a thriving condition, wearing his own hair on his head, the proper branches of this reasoning vegetable, till the axe of intemperance has lopped off his green boughs, and left him a withered trunk; he then flies to art, and puts on a periwig, valuing himself upon an unnatural bundle of hairs, all covered with powder, that never grew on his head; but now should this our broomstick pretend to enter the scene, proud of those birchen spoils it never bore, and all covered with dust, through the sweepings of the finest lady's chamber, we should be apt to ridicule and despise its vanity. Partial judges that we are of our own excellencies, and other men's defaults!
He was a bold man that first ate an oyster.
The two maxims of any great man at court are always to keep his countenance and never to keep his word.
Nothing is so great an instance of ill manners as flattery. If you flatter all the company, you please none; if you flatter only one or two, you affront the rest.
I won't quarrel with my bread and butter.
Books, the children of the brain.
She wears her clothes, as if they were thrown on her with a pitchfork.
Swift has a higher reputation than he deserves. His excellence is strong sense; for his humour, though very well, is not remarkably good. I doubt whether The Tale of a Tub be his; for he never owned it, and it is much above his worldly manner.
This evil fortune, which generally attends extraordinary men in the management of great affairs, has been imputed to divers causes, that need not be here set down, when so obvious a one occurs, if what a certain writer observes be true, that when a great genius appears in the world the dunces are all in confederacy against him.
Pride, ill nature, and want of sense, are the three great sources of ill manners.
Good manners is the art of making those people easy with whom we converse. Whoever makes the fewest persons uneasy is the best bred in the company.