Jonathan Swift — "It is a trite but true observation, that examples work more forcibly on the mind…"
It is a trite but true observation, that examples work more forcibly on the mind than precepts.
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More from Jonathan Swift
"We are told that the world is a great Bedlam, where the lunatics are the majority, and the few who are in their right senses are shut up by the rest."
"Conversation is but carving; Carve for all, yourself is starving: Give no more to every Guest, Than he's able to digest; Give him always of the Prime; And but little at a Time. Carve to all but just e…"
"A tavern is a place where madness is sold by the bottle."
"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."
"It is impossible that anything so natural, so necessary, and so universal as death, should ever have been designed by Providence as an evil to mankind."
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.