Quotes By Jonathan Swift

Most sorts of diversion in men, children and other animals, are in imitation of fighting.

I never wonder to see men wicked, but I often wonder to see them not ashamed.

Positiveness is a good quality for preachers and speakers because, whoever shares his thoughts with the public will convince them as he himself appears convinced.

Where there are large powers with little ambition... nature may be said to have fallen short of her purposes.

There were many times my pants were so thin I could sit on a dime and tell if it was heads or tails.

No man was ever so completely skilled in the conduct of life, as not to receive new information from age and experience.

Books, the children of the brain.

It is the folly of too many to mistake the echo of a London coffee-house for the voice of the kingdom.

A lie does not consist in the indirect position of words, but in the desire and intention, by false speaking, to deceive and injure your neighbour.

What they do in heaven we are ignorant of; what they do not do we are told expressly.

A man should never be ashamed to own that he has been in the wrong, which is but saying... that he is wiser today than yesterday.

We have enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love one another.

He was a fiddler, and consequently a rogue.

Don't set your wit against a child.

I never knew a man come to greatness or eminence who lay abed late in the morning.

A tavern is a place where madness is sold by the bottle.

May you live all the days of your life.

Vision is the art of seeing what is invisible to others.

Vanity is a mark of humility rather than of pride.

Censure is the tax a man pays to the public for being eminent.

I wonder what fool it was that first invented kissing.

Observation is an old man's memory.

My nose itched, and I knew I should drink wine or kiss a fool.

Politics, as the word is commonly understood, are nothing but corruptions.

He was a bold man that first ate an oyster.

Every dog must have his day.

It is a maxim among these lawyers, that whatever hath been done before, may legally be done again: and therefore they take special care to record all the decisions formerly made against common justice and the general reason of mankind.

Nothing is so hard for those who abound in riches as to conceive how others can be in want.

Interest is the spur of the people, but glory that of great souls. Invention is the talent of youth, and judgment of age.

Although men are accused of not knowing their own weakness, yet perhaps 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.