Jonathan Swift Quotes About Literature
-
Vanity is a mark of humility rather than of pride.
→ -
There is nothing in this world constant, but inconstancy.
→ -
There are few, very few, that will own themselves in a mistake.
→ -
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 tavern is a place where madness is sold by the bottle.
→ -
Men are happy to be laughed at for their humor, but not for their folly.
→ -
The power of fortune is confessed only by the miserable, for the happy impute all their success to prudence or merit.
→ -
Principally I hate and detest that animal called man; although I heartily love John, Peter, Thomas, and so forth.
→ -
One enemy can do more hurt than ten friends can do good.
→ -
What they do in heaven we are ignorant of; what they do not do we are told expressly.
→ -
Don't set your wit against a child.
→ -
Nothing is so hard for those who abound in riches as to conceive how others can be in want.
→ -
Where I am not understood, it shall be concluded that something very useful and profound is couched underneath.
→ -
Power is no blessing in itself, except when it is used to protect the innocent.
→ -
The proper words in the proper places are the true definition of style.
→ -
Satire is a sort of glass, wherein beholders do generally discover everybody's face but their own.
→ -
Most sorts of diversion in men, children and other animals, are in imitation of fighting.
→ -
Promises and pie-crust are made to be broken.
→ -
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.
→ -
Observation is an old man's memory.
→ -
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.
→ -
I never wonder to see men wicked, but I often wonder to see them not ashamed.
→ -
When a true genius appears, you can know him by this sign: that all the dunces are in a confederacy against him.
→ -
He was a fiddler, and consequently a rogue.
→ -
Censure is the tax a man pays to the public for being eminent.
→ -
There were many times my pants were so thin I could sit on a dime and tell if it was heads or tails.
→ -
Invention is the talent of youth, as judgment is of age.
→ -
Interest is the spur of the people, but glory that of great souls. Invention is the talent of youth, and judgment of age.
→ -
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.
→