Jonathan Swift — "The commonest things are the most useful; which shows the wisdom of God, who has…"
The commonest things are the most useful; which shows the wisdom of God, who has made them common.
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More from Jonathan Swift
"It is a miserable thing to be a man of sense in a country where the generality of the people are fools."
"Last week I saw a woman flayed, and you will hardly believe how much it altered her person for the worse."
"If a man would do good, he must be able to bear evil."
"The greatest wits, and the greatest fools, are equally innocent of the world."
"I calculate that the charge of nursing a beggar's child (in which list I reckon all cottagers, labourers, and four-fifths of the farmers) to be about two shillings per annum, rags included; and I beli…"
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.