Jonathan Swift Quotes on Man (23 Quotes)

Ingratitude is amongst them a capital crime, as we read it to have been in some other countries: for they reason thus; that whoever makes ill-returns to his benefactor, must needs be a common enemy to the rest of the mankind, from where he has received no obligations and therefore such man is not fit to live.

As blushing will sometimes make a whore pass for a virtuous woman, so modesty may make a fool seem a man of sense.

It is as hard to satirize well a man of distinguished vices, as to praise well a man of distinguished virtues.

It is useless to attempt to reason a man out of a thing he was never reasoned into

It is in men as in soils where sometimes there is a vein of gold which the owner knows not.

Some men, under the notion of weeding out prejudices, eradicate virtue, honesty, and religion

I never knew a man come to greatness or eminence who lay abed late in the morning.

No man was ever so completely skilled in the conduct of life, as not to receive new information from age and experience.

A wise man is never less alone than when he is alone

Men of great parts are often unfortunate in the management of public business because they are apt to go out of the common road by the quickness of their imagination.

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.

When the world has once begun to use us ill, it afterwards continues the same treatment with less scruple or ceremony, as men do to a whore

Every man desires to live long but no man would be old.

Censure is the tax a man pays to the public for being eminent.

Principally I hate and detest that animal called man; although I heartily love John, Peter, Thomas, and so forth.

Most sorts of diversion in men, children and other animals, are in imitation of fighting.

A wise man should have money in his head, but not in his heart.

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.

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.

Men are happy to be laughed at for their humor, but not for their folly.

If a man should register all his opinions upon love, politics, religion, learning, etc., beginning from his youth, and so go on to old age, what a bundle of inconsistencies and contradictions would appear at last.

A man should never be ashamed to own that he has been in the wrong, which is but saying... that he is wiser today than yesterday.

I said there was a society of men among us, bred up from their youth in the art of proving by words multiplied for the purpose, that white is black, and black is white, according as they are paid. To this society all the rest of the people are as slaves.