Jonathan Swift — "Happiness is a perpetual possession of being well deceived."
Happiness is a perpetual possession of being well deceived.
Get This Quote & Author's Image Illustrated On:
Click any product to generate a realistic preview. Up to 3 at a time.
* Initial load can take up to 90 seconds — revising the preview in another color is nearly instant.
Kitchen
Apparel
Other
More from Jonathan Swift
"I never saw, hear, nor read, that the clergy were beloved in any nation where Christianity was the religion of the country."
"The two great masters of the world are reason and passion."
"Reasoning will never make a man correct an ill opinion, which by reasoning he never acquired."
"If a man would register all his opinions upon love, politics, religion, learning, etc., beginning from his youth, and so go on to old age, what a bundle of inconsistencies and contradictions would app…"
"I am convinced that if all who are of the same opinion were to meet, the place of meeting would not be large enough to contain them."
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.