Quotes By Jonathan Swift

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

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.

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.

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.

We are so fond on one another because our ailments are the same.

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

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

Where there are large powers with little ambition... nature may be said to have fallen short of her purposes.

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

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.

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

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

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

The want of belief is a defect that ought to be concealed when it cannot be overcome.

The latter part of a wise person's life is occupied with curing the follies, prejudices and false opinions they contracted earlier.

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

May you live all the days of your life.

There is nothing constant in this world but inconsistency.

Where I am not understood, it shall be concluded that something very useful and profound is couched underneath.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Blessed is he who expects nothing, for he shall never be disappointed.

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

He was a bold man that first ate an oyster.

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

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