Jonathan Swift
Jonathan Swift
Jonathan Swiftwas an Anglo-Irish satirist, essayist, political pamphleteer, poet and cleric who became Dean of St Patrick's Cathedral, Dublin...
NationalityIrish
ProfessionWriter
Date of Birth30 November 1667
CountryIreland
men disorder advantage
Men who possess all the advantages of life are in a state where there are many accidents to disorder and discompose, but few to please them.
love learning men
If a man would register all his opinions upon love, politics, religion, learning etc., beginning from his youth, and so go to old age, what a bundle of inconsistencies and contradictions would appear at last.
advice warning mankind
How is it possible to expect that mankind will take advice when they will not so much as take warning.
dream night brain
Those dreams that on the silent night intrude, and with false flitting shapes our minds delude ... are mere productions of the brain. And fools consult interpreters in vain.
thinking self-improvement done
But you think that it is time for me to have done with the world, and so I would if I could get into a better before I was called into the best, and not die here in a rage, like a poisoned rat in a hole.
fall angel men
For in that universal call, Few bankers will to heaven be mounters; They'll cry, "Ye shops, upon us fall! Conceal and cover us, ye counters! When other hands the scales shall hold, And they, in men's and angels' sight Produced with all their bills and gold, 'Weigh'd in the balance and found light!'
block men trying
For want of a block, man will stumble at a straw.
lying done belief
It often happens that, if a lie be believed only for an hour, it has done its work, and there is no further occasion for it.
atheist infidelity devil
An atheist has got one point beyond the devil.
friendship years age
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. Letter to Alexander Pope. 7 Feb. 1736.
life garden years
I've often wish'd 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.
sides thirty chickens
She 's no chicken; she 's on the wrong side of thirty, if she be a day.
school men cooking
'T is an old maxim in the schools, That flattery 's the food of fools; Yet now and then your men of wit Will condescend to take a bit.
beauty animal circles
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 ...