Quotes from Jonathan Swift

take a strict view of their excrements, and, from the colour, the odour, the taste, the consistence, the crudeness or maturity of digestion, form a judgment of their thoughts and designs; because men are never so serious, thoughtful, and intent, as when they are at stool...

I remember it was with extreme difficulty that I could bring my master to understand the meaning of the word opinion, or how a point could be disputable; because reason taught us to affirm or deny only where we are certain; and beyond our knowledge we cannot do either.

So Geographers in Afric-maps With Savage-Pictures fill their Gaps; And o'er uninhabitable Downs Place Elephants for want of Towns

I heartily hate and detest that animal called man, although I heartily love John, Peter, Thomas, ans so forth.

Based on Gulliver's descriptions of their behaviour, the King describes Europeans as the most pernicious race of little odious vermin that nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth.

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.

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

They have a notion, that when people are met together, a short silence does much improve conversation: this I found to be true; for during those little intermissions of talk, new ideas would arise in their minds, which very much enlivened the discourse.

I desired that the Senate of Rome might appear before me in one large chamber, and a modern representative, in counterview, in another. The first seemed to be an assembly of heroes and demi-gods; the other, a knot of pedlars, pick-pockets, highwaymen, and bullies.

Gulliver describes a royal personage inspiring awe among the tiny Lilliputians because he was taller than his brethren by the breadth of a human fingernail.

Of so little weight are the greatest services to princes, when put into the balance with a refusal to gratify their passions.

For to enter the palace of learning at the great gate requires an expense of time and forms, therefore men of much haste and little ceremony are content to get in by the back-door.

Opium is not so stupefying to many persons as an afternoon sermon.

for they have no conception how a rational creature can be compelled, but only advised, or exhorted; because no person can disobey reason, without giving up his claim to be a rational creature.

I winked at my own littleness, as people do at their own faults.

A humour of reading books, except those of devotion or housewifery, is apt to turn a woman's brain... All affectation of knowledge beyond what is merely domestic, renders them vain, conceited and pretending.

My hours of leisure I spent in reading the best authors, ancient and modern, being always provided with a good number of books; and when I was ashore, in observing the manners and dispositions of the people, as well as learning their language; wherein I had a great facility, by the strength of my memory.

He likewise directed, "that every senator in the great council of a nation, after he had delivered his opinion, and argued in the defence of it, should be obliged to give his vote directly contrary; because if that were done, the result would infallibly terminate in the good of the public.

He said, "my discourse was all very strange, but especially the last part; for he could not understand, why nature should teach us to conceal what nature had given; that neither himself nor family were ashamed of any parts of their bodies; but, however, I might do as I pleased." 

all disgracers of the press in prose and verse condemned to eat nothing but their own cotton, and quench their thirst with their own ink.

As learnèd commentators view In Homer more than Homer knew.

Truth shines the brighter clad in verse.

Although men are accused of not knowing their own weakness yet perhaps few know their own strength. It is in men as in soils where sometimes there is a vein of gold which the owner knows not of.

It is the folly of too many to mistake the echo of a London coffee-house for the voice of the kingdom.