Quotes from Jonathan Swift

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.

A nice man is a man of nasty ideas.

Censure is the tax a man pays to the public for being eminent.

Under this window in stormy weather I marry this man and woman together; Let none but Him who rules the thunder Put this man and woman asunder.

Old men and comets have been reverenced for the same reason: their long beards, and pretences to foretell events.

I have always a sacred veneration for any one I observe to be a little out of repair in his person, as supposing him either a poet or a philosopher; because the richest minerals are ever found under the most ragged and withered surface of the earth.

And you know very well that coffee makes us severe, and grave, and philosophical.

When a true Genius appears in the World, you may know him by this Sign, that the Dunces are all in Confederacy against him.

I never knew any man cured of inattention.

'T is an old maxim in the schools, That flattery 's the food of fools; Yet now and then your men of wit Will condescend to take a bit.

So endless and exorbitant are the desires of men that they will grasp at all, and can form no scheme of perfect happiness with less.

Men always grow vicious before they become unbelievers.

One principal object of good-breeding is to suit our behaviour to the three several degrees of men, our superiors, our equals, and those below us.

Love of flattery, in most men, proceeds from the mean opinion they have of themselves; in women, from the contrary.

Men are happy to be laughed at for their humor, but not for their folly.

I never knew a man come to greatness or eminence who lay abed late in the morning.

I beg your pardon, my lord; promises and pie-crust are made to be broken.

Two women seldom grow intimate but at the expense of a third person.

In men desire begets love, and in women love begets desire.

I am convinced that if the virtuosi could once find out a world in the moon, with a passage to it, our women would wear nothing but what directly came from thence.

Common fluency of speech in many men and most women is owing to a scarcity of matter.

There is nothing constant in this world but inconsistency.

Indeed, madam, your ladyship is very sparing of your tea: I protest, the last I took was no more than water bewitch'd.

Every age might perhaps produce one or two geniuses, if they were not sunk under the censure and obloquy of plodding, servile, imitating pedants.