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
greed vices humankind
There is no vice which humankind carries to such wild extremes as that of avarice.
art children causes
O Grub Street! how do I bemoan thee, whose graceless children scorn to own thee! . Yet thou hast greater cause to be ashamed of them, than they of thee.
kind rating pedantry
Pedantry is properly the over-rating of any kind of knowledge we pretend to.
bread quarrels bread-and-butter
I won't quarrel with my bread and butter.
hate world charity
I hate nobody: I am in charity with the world.
prayer sunday journey
I always love to begin a journey on Sundays, because I shall have the prayers of the church to preserve all that travel by land, or water.
thinking owl woods
Do you think I was born in a wood to be afraid of an owl?
adversity ease firsts
In all distresses of our friends We first consult our private ends; While Nature, kindly bent to ease us, Points out some circumstance to please us.
young worst company
Usually speaking, the worst-bred person in company is a young traveller just returned from abroad.
elephants maps want
So geographers, in Africa maps, With savage pictures fill their gaps, And o'er uninhabitable downs Place elephants for want of towns
book common empty
For, what though his Head be empty, provided his Common place-Book be full...
science dozen biographies
If the world had but a dozen Arbuthnots I would burn my [Gulliver's] Travels.
men quality alive
Rebukes are easy from our betters, From men of quality and letters; But when low dunces will affront, What man alive can stand the brunt?
friends believe men
Your notions of friendship are new to me; I believe every man is born with his quantum, and he cannot give to one without robbing another. I very well know to whom I would give the first place in my friendship, but they are not in the way, I am condemned to another scene, and therefore I distribute it in pennyworths to those about me, and who displease me least, and should do the same to my fellow prisoners if I were condemned to a jail.