Quotes by Jonathan Swift

About Jonathan Swift:

Jonathan Swift was an Anglo-Irish satirist, essayist, political pamphleteer (first for the Whigs, then for the Tories), poet and cleric who became Dean of St Patrick's Cathedral, Dublin.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

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

Jonathan Swift

Every dog must have his day.

Jonathan Swift

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.

Jonathan Swift

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

Jonathan Swift

We are so fond on one another because our ailments are the same.

Jonathan Swift

What they do in heaven we are ignorant of; what they do not do we are told expressly.

Jonathan Swift

Don't set your wit against a child.

Jonathan Swift

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

Jonathan Swift

Coffee makes us severe, and grave and philosophical.

Jonathan Swift

That was excellently observed’, say I, when I read a passage in an author, where his opinion agrees with mine. When we differ, there I pronounce him to be mistaken.

Jonathan Swift

We of this age have discovered a shorter, and more prudent method to become scholars and wits, without the fatigue of reading or of thinking.

Jonathan Swift

If a man makes me keep my distance, the comfort is, he keeps his at the same time.

Jonathan Swift

Vision is the art of seeing things invisible.

Jonathan Swift

May you live every day of your life.

Jonathan Swift

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

Jonathan Swift

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

Jonathan Swift

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...

Jonathan Swift

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.

Jonathan Swift

But by what I have gathered from your own relation, and the answers I have with much pains wrung and extorted from you, I cannot but conclude the bulk of your natives to be the most pernicious race of odious vermin that nature ever suffered to crawl ...

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

I never wonder to see men wicked, but I often wonder to see them not ashamed.

Jonathan Swift

Author Bio

  • NameJonathan Swift
  • DescriptionAnglo-Irish satirist, essayist, poet, etc.
  • BornNovember 30, 1667
  • DiedOctober 19, 1745
  • CountryKingdom Of Ireland
  • ProfessionPoet; Novelist; Satirist; Philosopher; Human Rights Activist
  • WorksGulliver's Travels; A Modest Proposal; A Tale Of A Tub