Jonathan Swift (1667 – 1745)
Irish writer and satirist.
Bread is the staff of life.
Fingers were made before forks, and hands before knives.
Every man desires to live long, but no man would be old.
There was all the world and his wife.
There are few, very few, that will own themselves in a mistake, though all the World sees them to be in downright nonsense.
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…
I shall be like that tree; I shall die from the top.
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.
I never wonder to see men wicked, but I often wonder to see them not ashamed.
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.
…one enemy can do more hurt, than ten friends can do good.
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.
It is useless to attempt to reason a man out of a thing he was never reasoned into.
There is nothing in this world constant, but inconstancy.
As boys do sparrows, with flinging salt upon their tails.
I told him...that we ate when we were not hungry, and drank without the provocation of thirst.
Libertas et natale solum:
Fine words! I wonder where you stole 'em.
She's no chicken; she's on the wrong side of thirty, if she be a day.
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
The Bulk of mankind is as well equipped for flying as thinking.