Quotes By Jonathan Swift
Interest is the spur of the people, but glory that of great souls. Invention is the talent of youth, and judgment of age.
Jonathan Swift
The power of fortune is confessed only by the miserable, for the happy impute all their success to prudence or merit.
Jonathan Swift
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.
Jonathan Swift
Nothing is so hard for those who abound in riches as to conceive how others can be in want.
Jonathan Swift
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.
Jonathan Swift
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.
Jonathan Swift
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.
Jonathan Swift
As love without esteem is capricious and volatile; esteem without love is languid and cold.
Jonathan Swift
Satire is a sort of glass, wherein beholders do generally discover everybody's face but their own.
Jonathan Swift
For in reason, all government without the consent of the governed is the very definition of slavery.
Jonathan Swift
Poor nations are hungry, and rich nations are proud; and pride and hunger will ever be at variance.
Jonathan Swift
The latter part of a wise person's life is occupied with curing the follies, prejudices and false opinions they contracted earlier.
Jonathan Swift