Top 400 Jonathan Swift Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “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

152. “Pride, ill nature, and want of sense are the three great sources of ill manners; without some one of these defects, no man will behave himself ill for want of experience, or what, in the language of fools, is called knowing the world.”

— Jonathan Swift

153. “She has more goodness in her little finger than he has in his whole body.”

— Jonathan Swift

154. “Poor nations are hungry, and rich nations are proud; and pride and hunger will ever be at variance.”

— Jonathan Swift

155. “You must take the will for the deed.”

— Jonathan Swift

156. “There are few wild beasts more to be dreaded than a talking man having nothing to say.”

— Jonathan Swift

157. “Ale is meat, drink and cloth; it will make a cat speak and a wise man dumb.”

— Jonathan Swift

158. “The common fluency of speech in many men, and most women, is owing to a scarcity of matter and a scarcity of words; for whosoever is a master of language, and hath a mind full of ideas, will be apt, in speaking, to hesitate upon the choice of both.”

— Jonathan Swift

159. “I’m up and down and round about, Yet all the world can’t find me out; Though hundreds have employed their leisure, They never yet could find my measure.”

— Jonathan Swift

160. “Vanity is a mark of humility rather than of pride.”

— Jonathan Swift

161. “Nor do they trust their tongue alone, but speak a language of their own; can read a nod, a shrug, a look, far better than a printed book; convey a libel in a frown, and wink a reputation down.”

— Jonathan Swift

162. “I cannot but conclude that the Bulk of your Natives, to be the most pernicious Race of little odious Vermin that Nature ever suffered to crawl upon the Surface of the Earth.”

— Jonathan Swift

163. “I must complain the cards are ill shuffled till I have a good hand.”

— Jonathan Swift

164. “He had been eight years upon a project for extracting sunbeams out of cucumbers, which were to be put into vials hermetically sealed, and let out to warm the air in raw, inclement summers.”

— Jonathan Swift

165. “She wears her clothes as if they were thrown on with a pitchfork.”

— Jonathan Swift

166. “Under this window in stormy weather I marry this man and woman together; Let none but Him who rules the thunder Put this man and woman asunder.”

— Jonathan Swift

167. “Hobbes clearly proves, that every creature Lives in a state of war by nature.”

— Jonathan Swift

168. “I love good creditable acquaintance; I love to be the worst of the company.”

— Jonathan Swift

169. “Then, rising with Aurora’s light, The Muse invoked, sit down to write; Blot out, correct, insert, refine, Enlarge, diminish, interline.”

— Jonathan Swift

170. “It is a maxim among these lawyers, that whatever hath been done before, may legally be done again: and therefore they take special care to record all the decisions formerly made against common justice and the general reason of mankind.”

— Jonathan Swift

171. “A child will make two dishes at an entertainment for friends; and when the family dines alone, the fore or hind quarter will make a reasonable dish, and seasoned with a little pepper or salt will be very good boiled on the fourth day, especially in winter.”

— Jonathan Swift

172. “Love of flattery, in most men, proceeds from the mean opinion they have of themselves; in women, from the contrary.”

— Jonathan Swift

173. “When a man is made a spiritual peer he loses his surname; when a temporal, his Christian name.”

— Jonathan Swift

174. “Blot out, correct, insert, refine, enlarge, diminish, interline. Be mindful, when invention fails. To scratch your head and bite your nails.”

— Jonathan Swift

175. “Life is a tragedy wherein we sit as spectators for a while and then act our part in it.”

— Jonathan Swift

176. “All human race would be wits. And millions miss, for one that hits.”

— Jonathan Swift

177. “He was a fiddler, and consequently a rogue.”

— Jonathan Swift

178. “An excuse is a lie guarded.”

— Jonathan Swift

179. “It is a maxim, that those, to whom everybody allows the second place, have an undoubted title to the first.”

— Jonathan Swift

180. “Lilliputians think nothing can be more unjust, than for people, in subservience to their own appetites, to bring children into the world, and leave the burthen of supporting them on the public. As.”

— Jonathan Swift

181. “I’ll give you leave to call me anything, if you don’t call me spade.”

— Jonathan Swift

182. “I with borrow’d silver shine, What you see is none of mine. First I show you but a quarter, Like the bow that guards the Tartar: Then the half, and then the whole, Ever dancing round the pole.”

— Jonathan Swift

183. “They look upon fraud as a greater crime than theft, and therefore seldom fail to punish it with death; for.”

— Jonathan Swift

184. “If they would, for Example, praise the Beauty of a Woman, or any other Animal, they describe it by Rhombs, Circles, Parallelograms, Ellipses, and other geometrical terms...”

— Jonathan Swift

185. “Although the devil be the father of lies, he seems, like other great inventors, to have lost much of his reputation by the continual improvements that have been made upon him.”

— Jonathan Swift

186. “Big-endians and small-endians.”

— Jonathan Swift

187. “Of so little weight are the greatest services to princes, when put into the balance with a refusal to gratify their passions.”

— Jonathan Swift

188. “Reason is a very light rider, and easily shook off.”

— Jonathan Swift

189. “The tucked-up sempstress walks with hasty strides, While streams run down her oil’d umbrella’s sides.”

— Jonathan Swift

190. “Politics, as the word is commonly understood, are nothing but corruptions.”

— Jonathan Swift

191. “My nose itched, and I knew I should drink wine or kiss a fool.”

— Jonathan Swift

192. “Unjustly poets we asperse: Truth shines the brighter clad in verse, And all the fictions they pursue Do but insinuate what is true.”

— Jonathan Swift

193. “Apollo was held the god of physic and sender of disease. Both were originally the same trade, and still continue.”

— Jonathan Swift

194. “I have now lost my barrier between me and death; God grant I may live to be as well prepared for it, as I confidently believe her to have been! If the way to Heaven be through piety, truth, justice and charity, she is there.”

— Jonathan Swift

195. “She ’s no chicken; she ’s on the wrong side of thirty, if she be a day.”

— Jonathan Swift

196. “Neither are any wars so furious and bloody, or of so long continuance as those occasioned by difference in opinion, especially if it be in things indifferent.”

— Jonathan Swift

197. “He that calls a man ungrateful sums up all the veil that a man can be guilty of.”

— Jonathan Swift

198. “Who can deny that all men are violent lovers of the truth, when we see them so positive in their errors, which they will maintain out of their zeal for truth, although they contradict themselves every day of their lives.”

— Jonathan Swift

199. “For want of a block, man will stumble at a straw.”

— Jonathan Swift

200. “Vanity is a natural object of temptation to a woman.”

— Jonathan Swift