Jonathan Swift Quotes

I likewise felt several slender ligatures across my body, from my arm-pits to my thighs. I could only look upwards; the sun began to grow hot, and the light offended my eyes. I heard a confused noise about me; but in the posture I lay, could see nothing except the sky.

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 water.

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

Some men, under the notion of weeding out prejudice, eradicate virtue, honesty and religion.

So geographers, in Afric maps,
With savage pictures fill their gaps,
And o'er unhabitable downs
Place elephants for want of towns.

Bread is the staff of life.

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

My little friend Grildrig; you have made a most admirable panegyrick upon your country. You have clearly proved that ignorance, idleness, and vice, are the proper ingredients for qualifying a legislator. That laws are best explained, interpreted, and applied by those whose interest and abilities lie in perverting, confounding, and eluding them. I observe among you, some lines of an institution, which in its original might have been tolerable; but these half erased, and the rest wholly blurred and blotted by corruptions. It doth not appear, from all you have said, how any one perfection is required towards the procurement of any one station among you...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.

Libertas et natale solum:
Fine words! I wonder where you stole 'em.

it. He called it his oracle, and said, it pointed out the time for every action of his life.

Those dreams that on the silent night intrude,
And with false flitting shapes our minds delude … are mere productions of the brain.
And fools consult interpreters in vain.

As boys do sparrows, with flinging salt upon their tails.

He likewise directed, “that every senator in the great council of a nation, after he had delivered his opinion, and argued in the defence of it, should be obliged to give his vote directly contrary; because if that were done, the result would infallibly terminate in the good of the public.

A humour of reading books, except those of devotion or housewifery, is apt to turn a woman's brain... All affectation of knowledge beyond what is merely domestic, renders them vain, conceited and pretending.

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