Notable Quotes By Jonathan Swift, The Author Of Gulliver's Travels| Wise thoughts

May you live every day of your life. Vision is the art of seeing things invisible. When a great genius appears in the world you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him. Books, the children of the brain. Every man desires to live long, but no man wishes to be old. I never wonder to see men wicked, but I often wonder to see them not ashamed. It is useless to attempt to reason a man out of a thing he was never reasoned into. Proper words in proper places make the true definition of style. Undoubtedly, philosophers are in the right when they tell us that nothing is great or little otherwise than by comparison. No wise man ever wished to be younger. You should never be ashamed to admit you have been wrong. It only proves you are wiser today, than yesterday. Prejudice is the perpetual possession of being well deceived. There are few, very few, that will own themselves in a mistake. If a man makes me keep my distance, the comfort is, he keeps his at the same time. That was excellently observed, say I, when I read a passage in an author, where his opinion agrees with mine. When we differ, there I pronounce him to be mistaken. Some men, under the notion of weeding out prejudice, eradicate virtue, honesty and religion. The best doctors in the world are Dr. Diet, Dr. Quiet, and Dr. Merriman. Good manners is the art of making people comfortable. Whoever makes the fewest people uncomfortable has the best manners. Satire is a sort of glass, wherein beholders do generally discover everybody's face but their own. The latter part of a wise person's life is occupied with curing the follies, prejudices and false opinions they contracted earlier. Difference in opinions has cost many millions of lives, for instance, whether flesh be bread, or bread be flesh, whether the juice of a certain berry be blood or wine. Ever eating, never cloying, all devouring, all destroying never finding full repast, till I eat the world at last. Words are the clothing of our thoughts. A wife should be always a reasonable and agreeable companion, because she cannot always be young. Punning is a talent which no man affects to despise but he that is without it. Coffee makes us severe and grave and philosophical. The stoical scheme of supplying our wants by lopping off our desires, is like cutting off our feet, when we want shoes. Poor nations are hungry, and rich nations are proud, and pride and hunger will ever be at variance. As blushing will sometimes make a whore pass for a virtuous woman, so modesty may make a fool seem a man of sense. Opium is not so stupefying to many persons as an afternoon sermon. I hid myself between two leaves of sorrow, and there discharged the necessities of nature. I'm as old as my tongue and a little older than my teeth. As love without esteem is capricious and volatile, esteem without love is languid and cold. If 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. 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. Undoubtedly philosophers are in the right, when they tell us that nothing is great or little otherwise than by comparison. There's none so blind as they that won't see. Truth shines the brighter clad in verse. Books, like men their authors, have no more than one way of coming into the world, but there are ten thousand to go out of it and return no more. How vain an attempt it is for a man to endeavor to do himself honor among those who are out of all degree of equality or comparison with him. Readers may be divided into three classes, the superficial, the ignorant and the learned, and I have with much felicity fitted my pen to the genius and advantage of each. A soldier is a yahoo, hired to kill in cold blood as many of his own species, who have never offended him, as possibly he can. A wise man is never less alone than when he is alone. Caesar freely confessed to me, that the greatest actions of his own life were not equal, by many degrees, to the glory of taking it away. Leagues, till we were able to work no longer, being already spent with labor while we were in the ship. Besides, I now consider myself as bound by the laws of hospitality, to a people who had treated me with so much expense and magnificence.