Jonathan Swift Quotes

I shall be like that tree; I shall die from the top.

Violent zeal for truth hath an hundred to one odds to be either petulancy, ambition, or pride.

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

Nothing is so great an instance of ill manners as flattery. If you flatter all the company, you please none; if you flatter only one or two, you affront the rest.

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.

Pride, ill nature, and want of sense, are the three great sources of ill manners.

Pedantry is properly the over-rating of any kind of knowledge we pretend to.

Under an oak, in stormy weather,
I joined this rogue and whore together;
And none but he who rules the thunder
Can put this rogue and whore asunder.

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.

Then gave him some familiar Thumps,
A College Joke to cure the Dumps.

Vision is the Art of seeing Things invisible.

Yet malice never was his aim;
He lashed the vice but spared the name.
No individual could resent,
Where thousands equally were meant.
His satire points at no defect
But what all mortals may correct;
For he abhorred that senseless tribe
Who call it humor when they gibe.

Not die here in a rage, like a poisoned rat in a hole.

This evil fortune, which generally attends extraordinary men in the management of great affairs, has been imputed to divers causes, that need not be here set down, when so obvious a one occurs, if what a certain writer observes be true, that when a great genius appears in the world the dunces are all in confederacy against him.

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.