Jonathan Swift — "Happiness is a perpetual possession of being well deceived."
Happiness is a perpetual possession of being well deceived.
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More from Jonathan Swift
"Fine words! I wonder where you stole them."
"Reasoning will never make a man correct an ill opinion, which by reasoning he never acquired."
"What they do in the north, they do not in the south."
"Some people take more care to hide their wisdom than their folly."
"It is a maxim very generally received, that a man of great wit has a very short memory."
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.