Quotes By Jonathan Swift

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.

Don't set your wit against a child.

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.

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.

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.

He was a bold man that first ate an oyster.

Every dog must have his day.

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.

Nothing is so great an example of bad manners as flattery. If you flatter all the company, you please none; If you flatter only one or two, you offend the rest.

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.

As love without esteem is capricious and volatile; esteem without love is languid and cold.

The power of fortune is confessed only by the miserable, for the happy impute all their success to prudence or merit.

We are so fond on one another because our ailments are the same.

Satire is a sort of glass, wherein beholders do generally discover everybody's face but their own.

A wise person should have money in their head, but not in their heart.

It is impossible that anything so natural, so necessary, and so universal as death, should ever have been designed by providence as an evil to mankind.

Poor nations are hungry, and rich nations are proud; and pride and hunger will ever be at variance.

One enemy can do more hurt than ten friends can do good.

The proper words in the proper places are the true definition of style.