Quotes from Jonathan Swift

Lord! I wonder what fool it was that first invented kissing.

When the world has once begun to use us ill, and afterwards continues the same treatment with less scruple or ceremony, as men do to a whore.

Good manners is the art of making those people easy with whom we converse. Whoever makes the fewest persons uneasy, is the best bred in the company.

Possession, they say, is eleven points of the law.

Promise and pie-crust are made to be broken.

I know Sir John will go, though he was sure it would rain cats and dogs.

When I am reading a book, whether wise or silly, it seems to me to be alive and talking to me.

Nothing is so hard for those who abound in riches as to conceive how others can be in want.

Brutes find out where their talents lie; a bear will not attempt to fly.

What some invent the rest enlarge.

And he gave it for his opinion, that whoever could make two ears of corn, or two blades of grass, to grow upon a spot of ground where only one grew before, would deserve better of mankind and do more essential service to his country, than the whole race of politicians put together.

There was all the world and his wife.

Proper words in proper places, make the true definition of a style.

Nothing is so great an example of bad manners as flattery. If you flatter all the company, you please none; If you flatter only one or two, you offend the rest.

Most sorts of diversion in men children and other animals are in imitation of fighting.

Argument is the worst sort of conversation.

Many a truth is told in jest.

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

A carpenter is known by his chips.

Lose no time to contradict her, Nor endeavor to convict her; Only take this rule along, Always to advise her wrong, And reprove her when she's right; She may then grow wise for spite.

The reason why so few marriages are happy is because young ladies spend their time in making nets, not in making cages.

A wise man will find us to be rogues by our faces.

It is the first rule in oratory that a man must appear such as he would persuade others to be: and that can be accomplished only by the force of his life.

There are few wild beasts more to be dreaded than a talking man having nothing to say.