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Jonathan Swift



  • Bread is the staff of life.



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



  • Better  belly burst than good liquor be lost.



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



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



  • Promise and pie - crust are made to be broken.



  • When I am reading a book, Whether wise or silly, it seems to me to be alive and talking to me.



  • There's none so blind as they that won't see.



  • Reason is a very light rider, and easily shook off.



  • I won't quarrel with my bread and butter.



  • Complaint is the largest tribute Heaven receives.



  • As love without esteem is capricious and volatile; esteem without love is languid and cold.



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



  • All government without the consent of the governed is the very definition of slavery.



  • There is nothing in this world constant but inconstancy.



  • 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.



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



  • The first springs of great events, like those of great rivers, are ofter mean and little.



  • Power is no blessing in itself, except when it is used to protect the innocent.



  • They say fingers were made before forks, and hands before knives.



  • May you live all the days of your life.



  • Nothing is so hard for those who abound in riches as to conceive how others can be in want.



  • Don't set your wit against a child.



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



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



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



  • Vision is the art of seeing things invisible.



  • Every man desires to live long, but no man wishes to be old.



  • Books are the children of the brain.



  • Dignity, high station, or great riches are in some sort necessary to old men, in order to keep the younger at a distance, who are otherwise too apt to insult them upon the score of their age.



  • When men grow virtuous in their old age, they only make a sacrifice to God of the devil's leavings.



  • No wise man ever wished to be younger.



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



  • Every dog must have his day.



  • Very few men, properly speaking, live at present, but are providing to live another time.



  • Brutes find out where their talents lie; a bear will not attempt to fly.



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



  • A tavern is a place where madness is sold by the bottle.



  • A lie does not consist in the indirect position of words, but in the desire and intention by false speaking, to deceive and injure your neighbour.



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