Quotes
Quotes - Swift
I 've often wish'd that I had clear,
For life, six hundred pounds a year;
A handsome house to lodge a friend;
A river at my garden's end;
A terrace walk, and half a rood
Of land set out to plant a wood.
So geographers, in Afric maps,
With savage pictures fill their gaps,
And o'er unhabitable downs
Place elephants for want of towns.
Where Young must torture his invention
To flatter knaves, or lose his pension.
Hobbes clearly proves that every creature
Lives in a state of war by nature.
So, naturalists observe, a flea
Has smaller fleas that on him prey;
And these have smaller still to bite 'em;
And so proceed ad infinitum.
Libertas et natale solum:
Fine words! I wonder where you stole 'em.
A college joke to cure the dumps.
'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.
Hail fellow, well met.
Big-endians and small-endians.
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.
He had been eight years upon a project for extracting sunbeams out of cucumbers, which were to be put in phials hermetically sealed, and let out to warm the air in raw inclement summers.
It is a maxim, that those to whom everybody allows the second place have an undoubted title to the first.
Seamen have a custom, when they meet a whale, to fling him out an empty tub by way of amusement, to divert him from laying violent hands upon the ship.
Bread is the staff of life.
Books, the children of the brain.
As boys do sparrows, with flinging salt upon their tails.
He made it a part of his religion never to say grace to his meat.
How we apples swim!
The two noblest things, which are sweetness and light.
The reason why so few marriages are happy is because young ladies spend their time in making nets, not in making cages.
Censure is the tax a man pays to the public for being eminent.
A nice man is a man of nasty ideas.
If Heaven had looked upon riches to be a valuable thing, it would not have given them to such a scoundrel.
Not die here in a rage, like a poisoned rat in a hole.
