Jonathan Swift (1667 – 1745)
Irish writer and satirist.
Reasoning will never make a man correct an ill opinion, which by reasoning he never acquired...
For conversation well endued;
She calls it witty to be rude;
And, placing raillery in railing,
Will tell aloud your greatest failing.
May you live all the days of your life.
I said the thing which was not. (For they have no word in their language to express lying or falsehood.)
'Tis as cheap sitting as standing.
I cannot but conclude the bulk of your natives to be the most pernicious race of little odious vermin that nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth.
Ambition often puts men upon doing the meanest offices; so climbing is performed in the same posture with creeping.
Conversation is but carving!
Give no more to every guest
Than he's able to digest.
Give him always of the prime,
And but little at a time.
Carve to all but just enough,
Let them neither starve nor stuff,
And that you may have your due,
Let your neighbor carve for you.
I thought you and he were hand-in-glove.
And he gave it for his opinion, that whosoever could make two ears of corn or two blades of grass to grow upon a spot of ground where only one grew before, would deserve better of mankind, and do more essential service to his country, than the whole race of politicians put together.
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.
Lord, I wonder what fool it was that first invented kissing!
Positiveness is a good quality for preachers and orators, because he that would obtrude his thoughts and reasons upon a multitude, will convince others the more, as he appears convinced himself.
So, naturalists observe, a flea
Hath smaller fleas that on him prey;
And these have smaller still to bit 'em;
And so proceed ad infinitum.
Thus every poet, in his kind,
Is bit by him that comes behind.
A soldier is a Yahoo (man) hired to kill in cold blood as many of his own species, who have never offended him, as possibly he can.
'Tis an old maxim in the schools,
That flattery's the food of fools;
Yet now and then your men of wit
Will condescend to take a bit.
It is a maxim, that those to whom everybody allows the second place have an undoubted title to the first.
Reason is a very light rider and easily shook off.
She watches him, as a cat would watch a mouse.
That's as well said, as if I had said it myself.