Jonathan Swift Quotes

300 Sourced Quotes

Reason is a very light rider and easily shook off.

Jonathan Swift
She's no chicken; she's on the wrong side of thirty, if she be a day.

Jonathan Swift
Poor Pope will grieve a month, and Gay
A week, and Arbuthnot a day.
St John himself will scarce forbear
To bite his pen, and drop a tear.
The rest will give a shrug, and cry,
'I'm sorry—but we all must die!'

Jonathan Swift
Argument, as usually managed, is the worst sort of conversation; as it is generally in books the worst sort of reading.

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

Jonathan Swift
A child will make two dishes at an entertainment for friends; and when the family dines alone, the fore or hind quarter will make a reasonable dish, and seasoned with a little pepper or salt will be very good boiled on the fourth day, especially in winter.

Jonathan Swift
Positiveness is a good quality for preachers and orators, because he that would obtrude his thoughts and reasons upon a multitude, will convince others the more, as he appears convinced himself.

Jonathan Swift
No preacher is listened to but time, which gives us the same train and turn of thought that elder people have in vain tried to put into our heads before.

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

Jonathan Swift
I have one word to say upon the subject of profound writers, who are grown very numerous of late; and I know very well the judicious world is resolved to list me in that number. I conceive therefore, as to the business of being profound, that it is with writers as with wells - a person with good eyes may see to the bottom of the deepest, provided any water be there: and often when there is nothing in the world at the bottom besides dryness and dirt, though it be but a yard and a-half under-ground, it shall pass, however, for wondrous deep upon no wiser reason than because it is wondrous dark

Jonathan Swift
Seamen have a custom, when they meet a whale, to fling him out an empty tub by way of amusement, to divert him from laying violent hands upon the ship.

Jonathan Swift
The Vermin only teaze and pinch
Their foes superior by an Inch.
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.

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

Jonathan Swift
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.

Jonathan Swift
How haughtily he lifts his nose,
To tell what every schoolboy knows.

Jonathan Swift
What vexes me most is, that my female friends, who could bear me very well a dozen years ago, have now forsaken me, although I am not so old in proportion to them as I formerly was: which I can prove by arithmetic, for then I was double their age, which now I am not.

Jonathan Swift
Pray steal me not, I'm Mrs. Dingley's, Whose heart in this four-footed thing lies.

Jonathan Swift
It is computed, that eleven thousand persons have, at several times, suffered death, rather than submit to break their eggs at the smaller end.

Jonathan Swift
If they would, for Example, praise the Beauty of a Woman, or any other Animal, they describe it by Rhombs, Circles, Parallelograms, Ellipses, and other geometrical terms...

Jonathan Swift
The greatest Inventions were produced in Times of Ignorance; as the use of the Compass, Gunpowder, and printing; and by the dullest Nation, as the Germans.

Jonathan Swift
Of the Laputans:
They have likewise discovered two lesser stars, or satellites, which revolve about Mars, whereof the innermost is distant from the centre of the primary planet exactly three of his diameters, and the outermost five; the former revolves in the space of ten hours, and the latter in twenty one and a half.

Jonathan Swift
Men are contented to be laughed at for their wit, but not for their folly.

Jonathan Swift
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 an infallible medicine, after the patient is dead.

Jonathan Swift
Behold his funeral appears,
Nor widow's sighs, nor orphan's tears,
Wont at such times each heart to pierce,
Attend the progress of his hearse.
And what of that? his friends may say,
He had those honors in his day.
True to his profit and his pride,
He made them weep before he died.

Jonathan Swift
I told him... that we ate when we were not hungry, and drank without the provocation of thirst.

Jonathan Swift
Ambition often puts men upon doing the meanest offices; so climbing is performed in the same posture with creeping.

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

Jonathan Swift
I often wished that I had clear,
For life, six hundred pounds a-year,
A handsome house to lodge a friend,
A river at my garden's end,
A terrace walk, and half a rood
Of land, set out to plant a wood.

Jonathan Swift
Love of flattery, in most men, proceeds from the mean opinion they have of themselves; in women, from the contrary.

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

Jonathan Swift