Quotes from Jonathan Swift

Unjustly poets we asperse: Truth shines the brighter clad in verse, And all the fictions they pursue Do but insinuate what is true.

A ridiculous passion which hath no being but in play-books and romances.

I love good creditable acquaintance; I love to be the worst of the company.

I always love to begin a journey on Sundays, because I shall have the prayers of the church to preserve all that travel by land, or water.

111 company is like a dog, who dirts those most whom he loves best.

So geographers, in Africa maps, With savage pictures fill their gaps, And o'er uninhabitable downs Place elephants for want of towns

Small causes are sufficient to make a man uneasy, when great ones are not in the way: for want of a block he will stumble at a straw.

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

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

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.

Zsa Zsa Gabor, when asked which of the Gabor women was the oldest, said "She'll never admit it, but I believe it is Mama." When men grow virtuous in their old age, they only make a sacrifice to God of the devil's leavings.

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

I won't quarrel with my bread and butter.

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

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

We are so fond of each other because our ailments are the same.

Complaint is the largest tribute Heaven receives.

Every dog must have his day.

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

Bread is the staff of life.

I heard the little bird say so.

He had been eight years upon a project for extracting sunbeams out of cucumbers, which were to be put into vials hermetically sealed, and let out to warm the air in raw, inclement summers.

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

Satire is a sort of glass, wherein beholders do generally discover everybody's face but their own.