Jonathan Swift (1667 – 1745)
Irish writer and satirist.
There is, indeed, no wild beast more to be dreaded than a communicative man having nothing to communicate.
It is allowed on all hands, that the primitive way of breaking eggs, before we eat them, was upon the larger end; but his present majesty’s grandfather, while he was a boy, going to eat an egg, and breaking it according to the ancient practice, happened to cut one of his fingers. Whereupon the emperor his father published an edict, commanding all his subjects, upon great penalties, to break the smaller end of their eggs. The people so highly resented this law, that our histories tell us, there have been six rebellions raised on that account; wherein one emperor lost his life, and another his crown.
Promises and pie-crust are made to be broken.
We have just enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love one another.
Proper words in proper places, make the true definition of a style.
As love without esteem is volatile and capricious; esteem without love is languid and cold.
When a true genius appears in the world you may know him by this sign; that the dunces are all in confederacy against him.
Men are contented to be laughed at for their wit, but not for their folly.
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.
Vision is the art of seeing things invisible.
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.