Jonathan Swift quotes:

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

Better belly burst than good liquor be lost.

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.

Promises and pie-crust are made to be broken.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

Every man desires to live long, but no man wishes to be old.

Whatever the poets pretend, it is plain they give immortality to none but themselves; it is Homer and Virgil we reverence and admire, not Achilles or Aeneas. With historians it is quite the contrary; our thoughts are taken up with the actions, persons, and events we read, and we little regard the authors.

Observation is an old man's memory.

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.

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.

Words are but wind; and learning is nothing but words; ergo, learning is nothing but wind.

There are few, very few, that will own themselves in a mistake.

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

No wise man ever wished to be younger.

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.

In church your grandsire cut his throat; to do the job too long he tarried: he should have had my hearty vote to cut his throat before he married.

Then, rising with Aurora's light, The Muse invoked, sit down to write; Blot out, correct, insert, refine, Enlarge, diminish, interline.

A jargon form'd from the lost language, wit, Confounded in that Babel of the pit; Form'd by diseased conceptions, weak and wild, Sick lust of souls, and an abortive child; Born between whores and fops, by lewd compacts, Before the play, or else between the acts; Nor wonder, if from such polluted minds Should spring such short and transitory kinds.

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.

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

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.

There's none so blind as they that won't see.

What we call the Irish Brogue is no sooner discovered, than it makes the deliverer, in the last degree, ridiculous and despised; and, from such a mouth, an Englishman expects nothing but bulls, blunders, and follies.

Surely mortal man is a broomstick!

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

I love white Portugal wine better than claret, champagne, or burgundy. I have a sad vulgar appetite.

By candle-light nobody would have taken you for above five-and-twenty.

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

I must complain the cards are ill shuffled till I have a good hand.

In all assemblies, though you wedge them ever so close, we may observe this peculiar property, that over their heads there is room enough; but how to reach it is the difficult point. To this end the philosopher's way in all ages has been by erecting certain edifices in the air.

A chuck under the chin is worth two kisses.

They say fish should swim thrice * * * first it should swim in the sea (do you mind me?) then it should swim in butter, and at last, sirrah, it should swim in good claret.

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.

Punning is an art of harmonious jingling upon words, which, passing in at the ears, excites a titillary motion in those parts; and this, being conveyed by the animal spirits into the muscles of the face, raises the cockles of the heart.

Old men and comets have been reverenced for the same reason: their long beards, and pretences to foretell events.

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

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.

Although the devil be the father of lies, he seems, like other great inventors, to have lost much of his reputation by the continual improvements that have been made upon him.

It is very unfair in any writer to employ ignorance and malice together, because it gives his answerer double work.

When any one person or body of men seize into their hands the power in the last resort, there is properly no longer a government, but what Aristotle and his followers call the abuse and corruption of one.

He had been eight years upon a project for extracting sunbeams out of cucumbers, which were to be put into vials hermetically sealed, and let out to warm the air in raw, inclement summers.

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

There seems to be no part of knowledge in fewer hands than that of discerning when to have done.

It is as hard to satirize well a man of distinguished vices, as to praise well a man of distinguished virtues.

The axe of intemperance has lopped off his green boughs and left him a withered trunk.

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

A forward critic often dupes us With sham quotations peri hupsos, And if we have not read Longinus, Will magisterially outshine us. Then, lest with Greek he over-run ye, Procure the book for love or money, Translated from Boileau's translation, And quote quotation on quotation.

A fig for partridges and quails, ye dainties I know nothing of ye; But on the highest mount in Wales Would choose in peace to drink my coffee.

So, naturalists observe, a flea; Hath smaller fleas that on him prey; And these have smaller fleas to bite 'em, And so proceed ad infinitum.

Common fluency of speech in many men and most women is owing to a scarcity of matter.

The common fluency of speech in many men, and most women, is owing to a scarcity of matter and a scarcity of words; for whosoever is a master of language, and hath a mind full of ideas, will be apt, in speaking, to hesitate upon the choice of both.

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

He was a bold man that first ate an oyster.

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

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.

A lie is an excuse guarded

An excuse is a lie guarded.

If the world had but a dozen Arbuthnots I would burn my [Gulliver's] Travels.

Hail fellow, well met.

I have been assured by a very knowing American of my acquaintance in London, that a young healthy child well nursed is at a year old a most delicious, nourishing, and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled; and I make no doubt that it will equally serve in a fricassee or a ragout.

I never knew any man cured of inattention.

There is nothing constant in this world but inconsistency.

There is nothing in this world constant, but inconstancy.

He that calls a man ungrateful sums up all the veil that a man can be guilty of.

Power is no blessing in itself, except when it is used to protect the innocent.

An intelligent person should put money in the beginning, but not in heart

They say fingers were made before forks, and hands before knives.

Silks, velvets, calicoes, and the whole lexicon of female fopperies.

Nor do they trust their tongue alone, but speak a language of their own; can read a nod, a shrug, a look, far better than a printed book; convey a libel in a frown, and wink a reputation down.

... the atheists, libertines, despisers of religion ... that is to say all those who usually pass under the name of Free-thinkers.

Falsehood flies, and the truth comes limping after it.

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.

Live every day as your last, because one of these days, it will be.

Philosophy! the lumber of the schools.

May you live all the days of your life.

I cannot but conclude that 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.

Venus, a beautiful, good-natured lady, was the goddess of love; Juno, a terrible shrew, the goddess of marriage: and they were always mortal enemies.

The motives of the best actions will not bear too strict an inquiry. It is allowed that the cause of most actions, good or bad, may be resolved into the love of ourselves; but the self-love of some men inclines them to please others, and the self-love of others is wholly employed in pleasing themselves. This makes the great distinction between virtue and vice.

There is no vice or folly that requires so much nicety and skill to manage as vanity; nor any which by ill management makes so contemptible a figure.

It is the first rule in oratory that a man must appear such as he would persuade others to be: and that can be accomplished only by the force of his life.

The various opinions of philosophers have scattered through the world as many plagues of the mind as Pandora's box did those of the body; only with this difference, that they have not left hope at the bottom.

Careful observers may foretell the hour (By sure prognostics) when to dread a show'r. While rain depends, the pensive cat gives o'er Her frolics, and pursues her tail no more.

A wise man will find us to be rogues by our faces.

She wears her clothes as if they were thrown on with a pitchfork.

Polite Conversation 'Tis happy for him, that his father was before him.

Polite Conversation Why, everyone one as they like; as the good woman said when she kissed her cow.

Lord, Madame, I have fed like a farmer; I shall grow as fat as a porpoise.

Possession, they say, is eleven points of the law.

A footman may swear; but he cannot swear like a lord. He can swear as often: but can he swear with equal delicacy, propriety, and judgment?

Punning is a talent which no man affects to despise but he that is without it.

Quotations are best brought in to confirm some opinion controverted.

I know Sir John will go, though he was sure it would rain cats and dogs.

When a real genius appeares in this world, you'll know him by the fact that all the fools have allied against him.

Rhetoric in serious discourses is like the flowers in corn; pleasing to those who come only for amusement, but prejudicial to him who would reap profit from it.

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

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

He was a fiddler, and consequently a rogue.

A ridiculous passion which hath no being but in play-books and romances.

A prince, the moment he is crown'd, Inherits every virtue sound, As emblems of the sovereign power, Like other baubles in the Tower: Is generous, valiant, just, and wise, And so continues till he dies.

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

Let that be as it will, thus much is certain, that, however spiritual intrigues begin, they generally conclude like all others; they may branch upward toward heaven, but the root is in the earth.

Coffee makes us severe, and grave and philosophical.

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