Falsehood flies, and truth comes limping after it, so that when men come to be undeceived, it is too late; the jest is over, and the tale hath had its effect.
JONATHAN SWIFTThat 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.
More Jonathan Swift Quotes
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It is the talent of human nature to run from one extreme to another.
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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.
JONATHAN SWIFT -
Good manners is the art of making those people easy with whom we converse. Whoever makes the fewest people uneasy is the best bred in the room.
JONATHAN SWIFT -
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.
JONATHAN SWIFT -
If a lump of soot falls into the soup and you cannot conveniently get it out, stir it well in and it will give the soup a French taste.
JONATHAN SWIFT -
If you were not reasoned into your beliefs, you cannot be reasoned out of them.
JONATHAN SWIFT -
Nothing is so hard for those who abound in riches as to conceive how others can be in want.
JONATHAN SWIFT -
We are so fond on one another because our ailments are the same.
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.
JONATHAN SWIFT -
You cannot reason a person out of something they were not reasoned into.
JONATHAN SWIFT -
The common fluency of speech in many men, and most women, is owing to a scarcity of matter and a scarcity of words; for whosoever is a master of language, and hath a mind full of ideas, will be apt, in speaking, to hesitate upon the choice of both.
JONATHAN SWIFT -
Positiveness is a good quality for preachers and speakers because, whoever shares his thoughts with the public will convince them as he himself appears convinced.
JONATHAN SWIFT -
When a true genius appears, you can know him by this sign: that all the dunces are in a confederacy against him.
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Although the devil be the father of lies, he seems, like other great inventors, to have lost much of his reputation by the continual improvements that have been made upon him.
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It is computed that eleven thousand persons have at several times suffered death rather than submit to break their eggs at the smaller end.
JONATHAN SWIFT






