Jonathan Swift

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 appear at last!

It is useless to attempt to reason a man out of a thing he was never reasoned into.

The power of fortune is confessed only by the miserable, for the happy impute all their success to prudence or merit.

The world is a country which nobody ever yet knew by description; one must travel through it one's self to be acquainted with it.

I have been for some years past, as I hope to be for some years to come, a constant visitor of the sick, and a constant observer of the dying.

The two great masters of the world are reason and passion.

A nice man is a man of nasty ideas.

It is a melancholy object to those who walk through this great town, or travel in the country, when they see the streets, the roads, and cabin doors, crowded with beggars of the female sex, followed by three, four, or six children, all in rags, and importuning every passenger for an alms.

I could wish that some of our young divines would not think it beneath them to consult the most celebrated plays and romances, as well as the most approved poets and orators.

Every man desires to live long, but no man would be old.

Party is the madness of many for the gain of a few.

Argument is the worst enemy of truth.

I have been assured by a very knowing American of my acquaintance in London, that a young healthy child well nursed is at a year old a most delicious, nourishing, and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled; and I make no doubt that it will equally serve in a fricassee or a ragout.

The commonest things are the most useful; which shows the wisdom of God, who has made them common.

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.

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.

We are told that the Houyhnhnms have no vices, but those which are the product of their reason; and that the Yahoos have no virtues, but those which are the product of their instinct.

Dogs have at least the advantage over men, that they discover their friends, and bark at their enemies.

Books, the children of the brain.

The greatest ornament of an eminent character is humility.