Jonathan Swift

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

Vision is the art of seeing what is invisible to others.
– Jonathan Swift

Two friendships in two breasts requires the same aversions and desires.
– Jonathan Swift

Instead of dirt and poison we have rather chosen to fill our hives wit honey and wax; thus
furnishing mankind with the two noblest of things, which are sweetness and light.
– Jonathan Swift

War – that mad game the world so loves to play.
– Jonathan Swift

As blushing will sometimes make a whore pass for a virtous woman, so modesty may make a
fool seem a man of sense.
– Jonathan Swift

Books, the children of the brain.
– Jonathan Swift

I hate nobody: I am in charity with all the world.
– Jonathan Swift

If heaven had looked upon riches to be a valuable thing, it would not have given them to
such a scoundrel.
– Jonathan Swift

She wears her clothes as if they were thrown on her with a pitchfork.
– Jonathan Swift

I shall be like that tree, I shall die at the top.
– Jonathan Swift

We were to do more business after dinner; but after dinner is after dinner – an old saying and
a true, “much drinking, little thinking.”
– Jonathan Swift

‘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.
– Jonathan Swift

One enemy can do more hurt than ten friends can do good.
– Jonathan Swift

He had been eight years upon a project for extracting sunbeams out of cucumbers; which
were to be put in vials hermetically sealed, and let out to warm the air in raw inclement
summers.
– Jonathan Swift

Satire is a sort of glass, wherein beholders do generally discover everybody’s face but their
own.
– Jonathan Swift

A lie is an excuse guarded.
– Jonathan Swift

Laws are like cobwebs, which may catch small flies, but let wasps and hornets break through.
– Jonathan Swift

We are so fond of another, because our ailments are the same.
– Jonathan Swift

May you live all the days of your life.
– Jonathan Swift

I love good creditable acquaintance; I love to be the worst of the company.
– Jonathan Swift

There is nothing in the world constant, but inconstancy.
– Jonathan Swift

I never knew a man come to greatness or eminence who lay abed late in the morning.
– Jonathan Swift

Every man desires to live long, but no man would be old.
– Jonathan Swift

The sight of you is good for sore eyes.
– Jonathan Swift

No man was ever so completely skilled in the conduct of life, as not to receive new information
from age and experience.
– Jonathan Swift

What some invent the rest enlarge.
– Jonathan Swift