Jonathan Swift

“May you live every day of your life.”

“He was a bold man that first ate an oyster.”

“I never saw, heard, nor read, that the clergy were beloved in any nation where Christianity was the religion of the country. Nothing can render them popular, but some degree of persecution.”

“Laws are like cobwebs, which may catch small flies, but let wasps and hornets break through.”

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

“The want of belief is a defect that ought to be concealed when it cannot be overcome.”

“Where I am not understood, it shall be concluded that something very useful and profound is couched underneath.”

“When a true genius appears, you can know him by this sign: that all the dunces are in a confederacy against him.”

“For in reason, all government without the consent of the governed is the very definition of slavery.”

“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.”

“The latter part of a wise person's life is occupied with curing the follies, prejudices and false opinions they contracted earlier.”

“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.”

“Principally I hate and detest that animal called man; although I heartily love John, Peter, Thomas, and so forth.”

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

“The best doctors in the world are Doctor Diet, Doctor Quiet, and Doctor Merryman.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“There is nothing constant in this world but inconsistency.”

“Once kick the world, and the world and you will live together at a reasonably good understanding.”

“I wonder what fool it was that first invented kissing.”

“Men are happy to be laughed at for their humor, but not for their folly.”

“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 fiddler, and consequently a rogue.”

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

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

“It is in men as in soils where sometimes there is a vein of gold which the owner knows not.”

“Blessed is he who expects nothing, for he shall never be disappointed.”

“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.”

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

“The stoical scheme of supplying our wants by lopping off our desires, is like cutting off our feet when we want shoes.”

“If Heaven had looked upon riches to be a valuable thing, it would not have given them to such a scoundrel.”

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

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

“The tiny Lilliputians surmise that Gulliver's watch may be his god, because it is that which, he admits, he seldom does anything without consulting.”

“When the world has once begun to use us ill, it afterwards continues the same treatment with less scruple or ceremony, as men do to a whore.”

“Dignity, high station, or great riches are in some sort necessary to old men, in order to keep the younger at a distance, who are otherwise too apt to insult them upon the score of their age.”

“Zsa Zsa Gabor, when asked which of the Gabor women was the oldest, said "She'll never admit it, but I believe it is Mama." When men grow virtuous in their old age, they only make a sacrifice to God of the devil's leavings.”

“No wise man ever wished to be younger.”

“We are so fond of each other because our ailments are the same.”

“An excuse is a lie guarded.”

“111 company is like a dog, who dirts those most whom he loves best.”

“When a true genius appears in the world you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him.”

“Vision is the art of seeing things invisible.”

“When the world has once begun to use us ill, and afterwards continues the same treatment with less scruple or ceremony, as men do to a whore.”

“May you live all the days of your life.”

“I always love to begin a journey on Sundays, because I shall have the prayers of the church to preserve all that travel by land, or by water.”

“Brutes find out where their talents lie; a bear will not attempt to fly.”

“And he gave it for his opinion, that whoever 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.”

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

“Proper words in proper places, make the true definition of a style.”

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

“Falsehood flies, and truth comes limping after it, so that when men come to be undeceived, it is too late; the jest is over, and the tale hath had its effect: like a man, who hath thought of a good repartee when the discourse is changed, or the company parted; or like a physician, who hath found out...”

“That the universe was formed by a fortuitous concourse of atoms, I will no more believe than that the accidental jumbling of the alphabet would fall into a most ingenious treatise of philosophy.”

“Books, the children of the brain.”

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

“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.”

“Under this window in stormy weather I marry this man and woman together; Let none but Him who rules the thunder Put this man and woman asunder.”

“Human brutes, like other beasts, find snares and poison in the provision of life, and are allured by their appetites to their destruction.”

“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.”

“Better belly burst than good liquor be lost.”

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

“Good manners is the art of making those people easy with whom we converse. Whoever makes the fewest people uneasy is the best bred in the room.”

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

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