Jonathan Swift Quotes - Page 2

Possession they say is eleven points of the law.

There's none so blind as they that won't see.

I won't quarrel with my bread and butter.

These reasonings will furnish us with an adequate definition of a true critic: that he is a discoverer and collector of writers’ faults. Which may be farther put beyond dispute by the following demonstration: that whoever will examine the writings in all kinds, wherewith this ancient sect has honoured the world, shall immediately find, from the whole thread and tenor of them, that the ideas of the authors have been altogether conversant and taken up with the faults and blemishes, and oversights, and mistakes of other writers; and let the subject treated on be whatever it will, their imaginations are so entirely possessed and replete with the defects of other pens, that the very quintessence of what is bad does of necessity distil into their own, by which means the whole appears to be nothing else but an abstract of the criticisms themselves have made.

Most sorts of diversion in men children and other animals are in imitation of fighting.

What some invent the rest enlarge.

What some invent the rest enlarge.

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 know Sir John will go though he was sure it would rain cats and dogs.

When the world has once begun to use us ill and afterwards continues the same treatment with less scruple or ceremony as men do to a whore.

When the world has once begun to use us ill, it afterwards continues the same treatment with less scruple or ceremony, as men do to a whore.

They say fingers were made before forks and hands before knives.

We have just enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love one another.

There is nothing in this world constant but inconstancy.

He was a bold man that first ate an oyster.

But by what I have gathered from your own relation, and the answers I have with much pains wrung and extorted from you, I cannot but conclude the bulk of your natives to be the most pernicious race of odious vermin that nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth.

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: like a man, who hath thought of a good repartee when the discourse is changed, or the company parted; or like a physician, who hath found out an infallible medicine, after the patient is dead.

She looks as if butter wouldn't melt in her mouth.