Jonathan Swift (1667-1745) Quotes

Satire is a sort of glass, wherein beholders do generally discover everybody’s face but their own.

May you live all the days of your life.

The latter part of a wise person’s life is occupied with curing the follies, prejudices and false opinions they contracted earlier.

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

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

Happiness is the perpetual possession of being well deceived.

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

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.

It is a maxim, that those to whom everybody allows the second place have an undoubted title to the first.

Books, the children of the brain.

He made it a part of his religion never to say grace to his meat.

A nice man is a man of nasty ideas.

Lord M. What religion is he of? Lord Sp. Why, he is an Anythingarian

I mean you lie-under a mistake.

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 is none so blind as they that won’t see.

Blessed is he who expects nothing, for he shall never be disappointed.

Ambition often puts men upon doing the meanest offices; so climbing is performed in the same posture with creeping.

When a true genius appears in this world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him.

The stoical scheme of supplying our wants by lopping off our desires, is like cutting off our feet when we want shoes.

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

Where I am not understood, it shall be concluded that something very useful and profound is couched underneath.

Words are but wind; and learning is nothing but words; ergo, learning is nothing but wind.

Fine words! I wonder where you stole them.