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
happiness examination definitions
If we take an examination of what is understood by happiness ... we shall find all its properties ... under this short definition, that it is a perpetual possession of being well deceived.
food kissing bread
Bachelor's fare: bread and cheese, and kisses.
profound understanding literature
Where I am not understood, it shall be concluded that something very useful and profound is couched underneath.
country common-sense religion
I never saw, heard, nor read, that the clergy were beloved in any nation where Christianity was the religion of the country. Nothing can render them popular, but some degree of persecution.
littles gullivers-travels philosopher
Undoubtedly, philosophers are in the right when they tell us that nothing is great or little otherwise than by comparison.
weed honesty men
Some men, under the notion of weeding out prejudice, eradicate virtue, honesty and religion.
men talent punning
Punning is a talent which no man affects to despise but he that is without it.
taught-us opinion remember
I remember it was with extreme difficulty that I could bring my master to understand the meaning of the word opinion, or how a point could be disputable; because reason taught us to affirm or deny only where we are certain; and beyond our knowledge we cannot do either.
distance men comfort
If a man makes me keep my distance, the comfort is, he keeps his at the same time.
criticism opinion passages
That was excellently observed’, say I, when I read a passage in an author, where his opinion agrees with mine. When we differ, there I pronounce him to be mistaken.
sarcastic fine-words wonder
Fine words! I wonder where you stole them.
justice judging office
Judges... are picked out from the most dextrous lawyers, who are grown old or lazy, and having been biased all their lives against truth or equity, are under such a fatal necessity of favoring fraud, perjury and oppression, that I have known several of them to refuse a large bribe from the side where justice lay, rather than injure the faculty by doing any thing unbecoming their nature in office.
race earth littles
I cannot but conclude that the Bulk of your Natives, to be the most pernicious Race of little odious Vermin that Nature ever suffered to crawl upon the Surface of the Earth.
time world lasts
Ever eating, never cloying, All-devouring, all-destroying Never finding full repast, Till I eat the world at last.