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.
More Quotes from Jonathan Swift:
In the school of political projectors, I was but ill entertained, the professors appearing, in my judgment, wholly out of their senses which is a scene that never fails to make me melancholy. These unhappy people were proposing schemes for persuading monarchs to choose favorites upon the score of their wisdom, capacity, and virtue of teaching ministers to consult the public good of rewarding merit, great abilities, and eminent services, of instructing princes to know their true interest, by placing it on the same foundation with that of their people of choosing for employment persons qualified to exercise them with many other wild impossible chimeras, that never entered before into the heart of man to conceive and confirmed in me the old observation, that there is nothing so extravagant and irrational which some philosophers have not maintained for truth.Jonathan Swift
Reason is a very light rider, and easily shook off.
Jonathan Swift
Censure is the tax a man pays to the public for being eminent.
Jonathan Swift
The proper words in the proper places are the true definition of style.
Jonathan Swift
That the universe was formed by a fortuitous concourse of atoms, I will no more believe than that the accidental jumbling of the alphabet would fall into a most ingenious treatise of philosophy.
Jonathan Swift
Invention is the talent of youth, as judgment is of age.
Jonathan Swift
Readers Who Like This Quotation Also Like:
There's been a lot of speculation about every single girl I'm with and it actually does quite irritate me after a while, more so because it's a complete pain for the girls.Prince William
You would give up your career if you lost your voice for good, or if the impresarios stopped calling, or the audiences stopped coming. But as long as those things are there, I don't plan to stop. There is nothing that makes me feel better than to be with my public.
Celia Cruz
An artist is forced by others to paint out of his own free will.
Willem de Kooning