Quotes
Quotes - Swift
Complaint is the largest tribute Heaven receives.
Faith, that's as well said as if I had said it myself.
I warrant you lay abed till the cows came home.
Lord, Madame, I have fed like a farmer; I shall grow as fat as a porpoise.
They say fingers were made before forks, and hands before knives.
Bread is the staff of life.
Never sleeping, still awake, Pleasing most when most I speak; The delight of old and young, Though I speak without a tongue. Nought but one thing can confound me, Many voices joining round me, Then I fret, and rave, and gabble, Like the labourers of Babel.
'Tis 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.
Where Young must torture his invention To flatter knaves, or lose his pension.
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. Thus every poet in his kind Is bit by him that comes behind.
When a true genius appears in this world you may know him by the sign that the dunces are all in confederacy against him.
I heard the little bird say so.
What some invent, the rest enlarge.
For in reason, all government without the consent of the governed is the very definition of slavery.
They never would hear, But turn the deaf ear, As a matter they had no concern in.
The greatest inventions were produced in the times of ignorance, as the use of the compass, gunpowder, and printing.
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.
Discovery consists of seeing what everybody has seen and thinking what nobody else has thought.
Hail, fellow, well met, All dirty and wet: Find out, if you can, Who's master, who's man.
An old miser kept a tame jackdaw, that used to steal pieces of money, and hide them in a hole, which a cat observing, asked, "Why he would hoard up those round shining things that he could make no use of?" "Why," said the jackdaw, "my master has a whole chestfull, and makes no more use of them that I do."
A college joke to cure the dumps.
Laws are like cobwebs, which may catch small flies but which let wasps and hornets break through.
Nothing is so hard for those who abound in riches as to conceive how others can be in want. -Jonathan Swift.
Men are happy to be laughed at for their humor, but not for their folly.
As blushing will sometimes make a whore pass for a virtuous woman, so modesty may make a fool seem a man of sense.
