Jonathan Swift Quotes (188 Quotes)

Better belly burst than good liquor be lost.

Don't set your wit against a child.

A penny for your thoughts.

We have enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love one another.

So geographers, in Afric Marriages, With savage pictures fill their gaps, And o'er unhabitable downs Place elephants for want of towns.

Promises and pie-crust are made to be broken.

Whatever the poets pretend, it is plain they give immortality to none but themselves it is Homer and Virgil we reverence and admire, not Achilles and Aeneas

I have been assured by a very knowing American of my acquaintance in London, that a young healthy child, well nursed, is at a year old, a most delicious, nourishing, and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled and I make no doubt that it will equally serve in a fricassee, or a ragout.

I always like to begin a journey on Sundays, because I shall have the prayers of the Church to preserve all that travel by land or by water.

There are few, very few, that will own themselves in a mistake.

All human race would be wits. And millions miss, for one that hits.

I know Sir John will go, though he was sure it would rain cats and dogs.

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.

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 ...

'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.

He was a fiddler, and consequently a rogue.

It is a maxim among these lawyers, that whatever hath been done before, may legally be done again: and therefore they take special care to record all the decisions formerly made against common justice and the general reason of mankind.

Seamen have a custom, when they meet a whale, to fling him out an empty tub by way of amusement, to divert him from laying violent hands upon the ship.

The sight of you is good for sore eyes.

The greatest inventions were produced in the times of ignorance, as the use of the compass, gunpowder, and printing

Interest is the spur of the people, but glory that of great souls. Invention is the talent of youth, and judgment of age.

In church your grandsire cut his throat to do the job too long he tarried he should have had my hearty vote to cut his throat before he married.

Usually speaking, the worst-bred person in company is a young traveler just returned from abroad.

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

Happiness is a perpetual possession of being well deceived.

Proper words in proper places, make the true definition of style.

Nothing is so great an instance of ill-manners as flattery. If you flatter all the company, you please none if you flatter only one or two, you affront the rest.

If Heaven had looked upon riches to be a valuable thing, it would not have given them to such a scoundrel.

Two women seldom grow intimate but at the expense of a third person

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.

'T is as cheap sitting as standing.

There is nothing in this world constant, but inconstancy.

He was a bold man that first eat an oyster.

'T is nothing when you are used to it.

So, naturalists observe, a flea Hath smaller fleas that on him prey And these have smaller fleas to bite em, And so proceed ad infinitum. Thus every poet, in his kind, Is bit by him that comes behind.

Observation is an old man's memory.