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 SWIFTI’m as old as my tongue and a little older than my teeth.
More Jonathan Swift Quotes
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Everyone desires long life, not one old age.
JONATHAN SWIFT -
It is a miserable thing to live in suspense; it is the life of the spider.
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There is no vice which mankind carries to such wild extremes as that of avarice.
JONATHAN SWIFT -
No wise man ever wished to be younger.
JONATHAN SWIFT -
There is nothing constant in this world but inconsistency.
JONATHAN SWIFT -
Argument is the worst sort of conversation.
JONATHAN SWIFT -
There are few, very few, that will own themselves in a mistake.
JONATHAN SWIFT -
And surely one of the best rules in conversation is, never to say a thing which any of the company can reasonably wish had been left unsaid.
JONATHAN SWIFT -
No man will take counsel, but every man will take money. Therefore, money is better than counsel.
JONATHAN SWIFT -
There are few wild beasts more to be dreaded than a talking man having nothing to say.
JONATHAN SWIFT -
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.
JONATHAN SWIFT -
Books, the children of the brain.
JONATHAN SWIFT -
Poor nations are hungry, and rich nations are proud; and pride and hunger will ever be at variance.
JONATHAN SWIFT -
He was a bold man that first ate an oyster.
JONATHAN SWIFT -
Perverseness is your whole defence.
JONATHAN SWIFT -
For in reason, all government without the consent of the governed is the very definition of slavery.
JONATHAN SWIFT -
The bulk of mankind is as well equipped for flying as thinking.
JONATHAN SWIFT -
A nice man is a man of nasty ideas.
JONATHAN SWIFT -
Power is no blessing in itself, except when it is used to protect the innocent.
JONATHAN SWIFT -
It is a maxim among these lawyers, that whatever hath been done before, may legally be done again: and therefore they take special care to record all the decisions formerly made against common justice and the general reason of mankind.
JONATHAN SWIFT -
It is impossible that anything so natural, so necessary, and so universal as death, should ever have been designed by providence as an evil to mankind.
JONATHAN SWIFT -
Nothing is so hard for those who abound in riches as to conceive how others can be in want.
JONATHAN SWIFT -
There’s none so blind as they that won’t see.
JONATHAN SWIFT -
Ay, do despise me, I’m the prouder for it; I like to be despised.
JONATHAN SWIFT -
Reason is a very light rider, and easily shook off.
JONATHAN SWIFT -
I never knew a man come to greatness or eminence who lay abed late in the morning.
JONATHAN SWIFT