Top 400 Jonathan Swift Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “Most sorts of diversion in men, children and other animals, are in imitation of fighting.”

— Jonathan Swift

102. “For poetry, he’s past his prime, He takes an hour to find a rhyme; His fire is out, his wit decayed, His fancy sunk, his muse a jade. I’d have him throw away his pen, But there’s no talking to some men.”

— Jonathan Swift

103. “A carpenter is known by his chips.”

— Jonathan Swift

104. “A pleasant companion is as good as a coach.”

— Jonathan Swift

105. “Love why do we one passion call, When ’tis a compound of them all? Where hot and cold, where sharp and sweet, In all their equipages meet; Where pleasures mix’d with pains appear, Sorrow with joy, and hope with fear.”

— Jonathan Swift

106. “A true critic, in the perusal of a book, is like a dog at a feast, whose thoughts and stomach are wholly set upon what the guests fling away, and consequently is apt to snarl most when there are the fewest bones.”

— Jonathan Swift

107. “That incessant envy wherewith the common rate of mankind pursues all superior natures to their own.”

— Jonathan Swift

108. “Usually speaking, the worst-bred person in company is a young traveller just returned from abroad.”

— Jonathan Swift

109. “When dunces are satiric, I take it for a panegyric.”

— Jonathan Swift

110. “That was excellently observed’, say I, when I read a passage in an author, where his opinion agrees with mine. When we differ, there I pronounce him to be mistaken.”

— Jonathan Swift

111. “There are few, very few, that will own themselves in a mistake.”

— Jonathan Swift

112. “A little grain of the romance is no ill ingredient to preserve and exalt the dignity of human nature, without which it is apt to degenerate into everything that is sordid, vicious and low.”

— Jonathan Swift

113. “Common fluency of speech in many men and most women is owing to a scarcity of matter.”

— Jonathan Swift

114. “Such constant irreconcilable enemies to science are the common people.”

— Jonathan Swift

115. “When a man’s fancy gets astride on his reason, when imagination is at cuffs with the senses, and common understanding as well as common sense, is kicked out of doors; the first proselyte he makes is himself.”

— Jonathan Swift

116. “Last week I saw a woman flayed, and you will hardly believe, how much it altered her person for the worse.”

— Jonathan Swift

117. “Principally I hate and detest that animal called man; although I heartily love John, Peter, Thomas, and so forth.”

— Jonathan Swift

118. “My father had a small Estate in Nottinghamshire; I was the Third of five Sons.”

— Jonathan Swift

119. “Sweeping from butcher’s stalls, dung, guts, and blood, Drown’d puppies, stinking sprats, all drench’d in mud, Dead cats, and turnip-tops, come tumbling down the flood.”

— Jonathan Swift

120. “It is the folly of too many to mistake the echo of a London coffee-house for the voice of the kingdom.”

— Jonathan Swift

121. “It often happens that, if a lie be believed only for an hour, it has done its work, and there is no further occasion for it.”

— Jonathan Swift

122. “I winked at my own littleness, as people do at their own faults.”

— Jonathan Swift

123. “Invention is the talent of youth, as judgment is of age.”

— Jonathan Swift

124. “The reason why so few marriages are happy is because young ladies spend their time in making nets, not in making cages.”

— Jonathan Swift

125. “In all distresses of our friends We first consult our private ends; While Nature, kindly bent to ease us, Points out some circumstance to please us.”

— Jonathan Swift

126. “I never wonder to see men wicked, but I often wonder to see them not ashamed.”

— Jonathan Swift

127. “If a man makes me keep my distance, the comfort is, he keeps his at the same time.”

— Jonathan Swift

128. “It is a miserable thing to live in suspense; it is the life of the spider.”

— Jonathan Swift

129. “War: that mad game the world so loves to play.”

— Jonathan Swift

130. “His features are strong and masculine, with an Austrian lip and arched nose, his complexion olive, his countenance erect, his body and limbs well proportioned, all his motions graceful, and his deportment majestic. He.”

— Jonathan Swift

131. “We have enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love one another.”

— Jonathan Swift

132. “Ever eating, never cloying, All-devouring, all-destroying Never finding full repast, Till I eat the world at last.”

— Jonathan Swift

133. “Time is painted with a lock before, and bald behind, signifying thereby that we must take time by the forelock; for, when it is once past, there is no recalling it.”

— Jonathan Swift

134. “Triumphant Tories, and desponding Whigs, Forget their feuds, and join to save their wigs.”

— Jonathan Swift

135. “No man will take counsel, but every man will take money. Therefore, money is better than counsel.”

— Jonathan Swift

136. “They say fingers were made before forks, and hands before knives.”

— Jonathan Swift

137. “The greatest Inventions were produced in Times of Ignorance; as the Use of the Compass, Gunpowder, and Printing; and by the dullest Nation, as the Germans.”

— Jonathan Swift

138. “With a whirl of thought oppressed I sink from reverie to rest. An horrid vision seized my head, I saw the graves give up their dead.”

— Jonathan Swift

139. “Satire is a sort of glass wherein beholders do generally discover everybody’s face but their own; which is the chief reason for that kind reception it meets with in the world, and that so very few are offended with it.”

— Jonathan Swift

140. “Nothing is so great an example of bad manners as flattery. If you flatter all the company, you please none; If you flatter only one or two, you offend the rest.”

— Jonathan Swift

141. “This made me reflect, how vain an attempt it is for a man to endeavor to do himself honor among those who are out of all degree of equality or comparison with him.”

— Jonathan Swift

142. “What poet would not grieve to see His brother write as well as he? But rather than they should excel, He’d wish his rivals all in Hell.”

— Jonathan Swift

143. “My horses understand me tolerably well; I converse with them at least four hours every day. They are strangers to bridle or saddle; they live in great amity with me, and friendship of each other.”

— Jonathan Swift

144. “When men grow virtuous in their old age, they only make a sacrifice to God of the devil’s leavings.”

— Jonathan Swift

145. “That the universe was formed by a fortuitous concourse of atoms, I will no more believe than that the accidental jumbling of the alphabet would fall into a most ingenious treatise of philosophy.”

— Jonathan Swift

146. “Daphne knows, with equal ease, How to vex and how to please; But the folly of her sex Makes her sole delight to vex.”

— Jonathan Swift

147. “This is every cook’s opinion – no savory dish without an onion, but lest your kissing should be spoiled your onions must be fully boiled.”

— Jonathan Swift

148. “I have ever hated all nations, professions, and communities, and all my love is toward individuals.”

— Jonathan Swift

149. “The various opinions of philosophers have scattered through the world as many plagues of the mind as Pandora’s box did those of the body; only with this difference, that they have not left hope at the bottom.”

— Jonathan Swift

150. “Pride, ill nature, and want of sense, are the three great sources of ill manners.”

— Jonathan Swift