Jonathan Swift — "Books, like friends, should be few and well chosen."
Books, like friends, should be few and well chosen.
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More from Jonathan Swift
"The only way to keep your health is to eat what you don't want, drink what you don't like, and do what you'd rather not."
"The reason why so few marriages are happy, is, because young ladies spend their time in making nets, not in making cages."
"Vision is the art of seeing things invisible."
"The common fluency of speech in many men, and most women, is owing to a scarcity of matter and a torrent of words; for whoever is master of an art, and hath a proper fund of materials, and a suitable …"
"When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him."
About Jonathan Swift (1667-1745)
Anglo-Irish satirist and Dean of Dublin's St Patrick's Cathedral whose Gulliver's Travels (1726) and A Modest Proposal (1729) are the canonical English-language satires. Closely associated with Alexander Pope (Scriblerus Club poet and collaborator) and John Gay (Beggar's Opera author and satirical contemporary). For an intellectual contrast, see Daniel Defoe, English Whig journalist and Robinson Crusoe author (1660-1731) — Defoe's Crusoe (1719) celebrates Enlightenment self-reliance and the colonial-mercantile project; Swift's Gulliver (1726) systematically dismantles every form of human pretension Defoe celebrated. The cleanest Augustan Whig-vs-Tory literary pairing — optimistic-empirical vs misanthropic-satirical.
Details
Attributed, but exact source is difficult to pinpoint. Often appears in collections of his sayings.
Date: 18th Century
GeneralVerification
Unverifiable
Found in 1 providers: grok
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