Jonathan Swift — "It is as impossible to please all men as to make a coat for the moon."
It is as impossible to please all men as to make a coat for the moon.
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More from Jonathan Swift
"Every man desires to live long, but no man would be old."
"I profess, in the sincerity of my heart, that I have not the least personal interest in endeavouring to promote this necessary work, having no other motive than the public good of my country, by advan…"
"The power of fortune is confessed only by the miserable, for the happy impute all their success to prudence or merit."
"When dunces are satiric, I take it for a panegyric."
"There are few, very few, that will own themselves in a mistake, though all the World sees them to be in downright nonsense."
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.