Quotes from Jonathan Swift

Pedantry is properly the over-rating of any kind of knowledge we pretend to.

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

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

I love white Portugal wine better than claret, champagne, or burgundy. I have a sad vulgar appetite.

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.

Coffee makes us severe, and grave and philosophical.

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

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.

Laws are like cobwebs, which may catch small flies, but let wasps and hornets break through.

It is a miserable thing to live in suspense; it is the life of the spider.

The best Maxim I know in this life is, to drink your Coffee when you can, and when you cannot, to be easy without it.

Every day is an opportunity to make a new happy ending. May you live all the days of your life.

There were many times my pants were so thin I could sit on a dime and tell if it was heads or tails.

Arbitrary power is but the first natural step from anarchy, or the savage life.

Promises and pie-crust are made to be broken.

He was a fiddler, and consequently a rogue.

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

The power of fortune is confessed only by the miserable, for the happy impute all their success to prudence or merit.

Human brutes, like other beasts, find snares and poison in the provision of life, and are allured by their appetites to their destruction.

In all I wish, how happy should I be, Thou grand Deluder, were it not for thee? So weak thou art that fools thy power despise; And yet so strong, thou triumph'st o'er the wise.

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

Where there are large powers with little ambition... nature may be said to have fallen short of her purposes.

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

My nose itched, and I knew I should drink wine or kiss a fool.