Jonathan Swift Quotes

300 Sourced Quotes

Apollo was held the god of physic and sender of disease. Both were originally the same trade, and still continue.

Jonathan Swift
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.

Jonathan Swift
Nature has left every man a capacity of being agreeable, though not of shining in company; and there are a hundred men sufficiently qualified for both who, by a very few faults, that they might correct in half an hour, are not so much as tolerable.

Jonathan Swift
When I am in danger of bursting, I will go and whisper among the reeds.

Jonathan Swift
Physicians ought not to give their judgment of religion, for the same reason that butchers are not admitted to be jurors upon life and death.

Jonathan Swift
I used to wonder how a man of birth and spirit could endure to be wholly insignificant and obscure in a foreign country, when he might live with lustre in his own.

Jonathan Swift
Neither is it safe to count upon the weakness of any man's understanding, who is thoroughly possessed of the spirit of revenge to sharpen his invention.

Jonathan Swift
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?

Jonathan Swift
If the men of wit and genius would resolve never to complain in their works of critics and detractors, the next age would not know that they ever had any.

Jonathan Swift
This load-stone is under the care of certain astronomers, who from time to time give it such positions as the monarch directs. They spend the greatest part of their lives in observing the celestial bodies, which they do by the assistance of glasses, far excelling ours in goodness.

Jonathan Swift
There was an astronomer who had undertaken to place a sun-dial upon the great weather-cock on the town-house, by adjusting the annual and diurnal motions of the earth and sun, so as to answer and coincide with all accidental turnings of the wind.

Jonathan Swift
Usually speaking, the worst-bred person in company is a young traveller just returned from abroad.

Jonathan Swift
What poet would not grieve to see
His brother write as well as he?
But rather than they should excel,
He'd wish his rivals all in Hell.

Jonathan Swift
The most ignorant person, at a reasonable charge, and with a little bodily labour, might write books in philosophy, poetry, politics, laws, mathematics, and theology, without the least assistance from genius or study.

Jonathan Swift
How often do we contradict the right rules of reason in the whole course of our lives! Reason itself is true and just, but the reason of every particular man is weak and wavering, perpetually swayed and turned by his interests, his passions, and his vices.

Jonathan Swift
Say, Britain, could you ever boast, Three poets in an age at most? Our chilling climate hardly bears A sprig of bays in fifty years.

Jonathan Swift
Unjustly poets we asperse: Truth shines the brighter clad in verse, And all the fictions they pursue Do but insinuate what is true.

Jonathan Swift
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.

Jonathan Swift
I have known some men possessed of good qualities which were very serviceable to others, but useless to themselves; like a sun-dial on the front of a house, to inform the neighbours and passengers, but not the owner within.

Jonathan Swift
I have now lost my barrier between me and death; God grant I may live to be as well prepared for it, as I confidently believe her to have been! If the way to Heaven be through piety, truth, justice and charity, she is there.

Jonathan Swift
What is called understanding is often no more than a state where one has become familiar with what one does not understand.

Jonathan Swift
Strange an astrologer should die, without one wonder in the sky.

Jonathan Swift
The ruin of a State is generally preceded by an universal degeneracy of manners and contempt of religion.

Jonathan Swift
For, what though his Head be empty, provided his Common place-Book be full...

Jonathan Swift
A true critic, in the perusal of a book, is like a dog at a feast, whose thoughts and stomach are wholly set upon what the guests fling away, and consequently is apt to snarl most when there are the fewest bones.

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

Jonathan Swift
And, is not Virtue in Mankind
The Nutriment that feeds the Mind?

Jonathan Swift
Ale is meat, drink and cloth; it will make a cat speak and a wise man dumb.

Jonathan Swift
The translators of the Bible were masters of an English style much fitter for that work than any we see in our present writings; the which is owing to the simplicity that runs through the whole.

Jonathan Swift
The example alone of a vicious prince will corrupt an age; but that of a good one will not reform it.

Jonathan Swift