Quotes from Jonathan Swift

All fits of pleasure are balanced by an equal degree of pain or languor; it is like spending this year part of the next year's revenues

Invention is the talent of youth, as judgment is of age.

Vanity is a natural object of temptation to a woman.

Argument, as usually managed, is the worst sort of conversation, as in books it is generally the worst sort of reading

Argument is the worst sort of conversation.

Flattery is the worst and falsest way of showing our esteem

Vision is the art of seeing things invisible to others.

Don't set your wit against a child.

There is nothing in this world constant, but inconstancy.

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.

What some invent the rest enlarge.

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

Ubi saeva indignatio ulterius cor lacerare nequit [Where savage indignation can lacerate his heart no more].

All true believers shall break their eggs at the convenient end: and which is the convenient end, seems, in my humble opinion, to be left to every man's conscience.

Under an oak, in stormy weather,I joined this rogue and whore together;And none but he who rules the thunderCan put this rogue and whore asunder.

With my own fair hands.

War! that mad game the world so loves to play.

Good God! What a genius I had when I wrote that book [A Tale of a Tub].

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

She wears her clothes, as if they were thrown on her with a pitchfork.

Promises and pie-crust are made to be broken.

'Tis an old maxim in the schools,That flattery's the food of fools;Yet now and then your men of witWill condescend to take a bit.

Hobbes clearly proves that every creatureLives in a state of war by nature.

Hail, fellow, well met,All dirty and wet:Find out if you can,Who's master, who's man.