Top 400 Jonathan Swift Quotes (2025 Update)
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251. “I have always a sacred veneration for anyone I observe to be a little out of repair in his person, as supposing him either a poet or a philosopher.”

— Jonathan Swift

252. “She watches him as a cat would watch a mouse.”

— Jonathan Swift

253. “It is an uncontrolled truth, that no man ever made an ill figure who understood his own talents, nor a good one who mistook them.”

— Jonathan Swift

254. “We are so fond on one another because our ailments are the same.”

— Jonathan Swift

255. “I forget whether advice be among the lost things which Ariosto says are to be found in the moon: that and time ought to have been there.”

— Jonathan Swift

256. “If sailor tales to sailor tunes, Storm and adventures, heat and cold, If schooners, islands, and maroons, And Buccaneers and buried Gold, And all the old romance, retold Exactly in the ancient way, Can please, as me they pleased of old, The wiser youngsters of to-day:.”

— Jonathan Swift

257. “A traveler’s chief aim should be to make men wiser and better, and to improve their minds by the bad-as well as good example of what they deliver concerning foreign places.”

— Jonathan Swift

258. “A poor spirit is poorer than a poor purse. A very few pounds a year would ease a man of the scandal of avarice.”

— Jonathan Swift

259. “Punning is an art of harmonious jingling upon words, which, passing in at the ears, excites a titillary motion in those parts; and this, being conveyed by the animal spirits into the muscles of the face, raises the cockles of the heart.”

— Jonathan Swift

260. “Do you think I was born in a wood to be afraid of an owl?”

— Jonathan Swift

261. “Three kings protested to me, that in their whole reigns they never did once prefer any person of merit, unless by mistake, or treachery of some minister in whom they confided; neither would they do it if they were to live again: and they showed, with great strength of reason, that the royal throne could not be supported without corruption, because that positive, confident, restive temper, which virtue infused into a man, was a perpetual clog to public business.”

— Jonathan Swift

262. “Praise is the daughter of present power.”

— Jonathan Swift

263. “Hail, follow, well met, All dirty and wet: Find out, if you can, Who’s master, who’s man.”

— Jonathan Swift

264. “When any one person or body of men seize into their hands the power in the last resort, there is properly no longer a government, but what Aristotle and his followers call the abuse and corruption of one.”

— Jonathan Swift

265. “Whoever makes the fewest persons uneasy, is the best bred man in company.”

— Jonathan Swift

266. “A secret is seldom safe in more than one breast.”

— Jonathan Swift

267. “A college joke to cure the dumps.”

— Jonathan Swift

268. “Say, Britain, could you ever boast, Three poets in an age at most? Our chilling climate hardly bears A sprig of bays in fifty years.”

— Jonathan Swift

269. “In all I wish, how happy should I be, Thou grand Deluder, were it not for thee? So weak thou art that fools thy power despise; And yet so strong, thou triumph’st o’er the wise.”

— Jonathan Swift

270. “There were many times my pants were so thin I could sit on a dime and tell if it was heads or tails.”

— Jonathan Swift

271. “Tis nothing when you are used to it.”

— Jonathan Swift

272. “Brutes find out where their talents lie; a bear will not attempt to fly.”

— Jonathan Swift

273. “Rebukes are easy from our betters, From men of quality and letters; But when low dunces will affront, What man alive can stand the brunt?”

— Jonathan Swift

274. “Complaint is the largest tribute heaven receives and the sincerest part of our devotion.”

— Jonathan Swift

275. “Religion supposed Heaven and Hell, the word of God, and sacraments, and twenty other circumstances which, taken seriously, are a wonderful check to wit and humour.”

— Jonathan Swift

276. “Possession, they say, is eleven points of the law.”

— Jonathan Swift

277. “Pray steal me not, I’m Mrs. Dingley’s, Whose heart in this four-footed thing lies.”

— Jonathan Swift

278. “Men are happy to be laughed at for their humor, but not for their folly.”

— Jonathan Swift

279. “There never appear more than five or six men of genius in an age, but if they were united the world could not stand before them.”

— Jonathan Swift

280. “From not the gravest of Divines, Accept for once some serious Lines.”

— Jonathan Swift

281. “Philosophy! the lumber of the schools.”

— Jonathan Swift

282. “In like manner, the disbelief of a Divine Providence renders a man uncapable of holding any public station; for, since kings avow themselves to be the deputies of Providence.”

— Jonathan Swift

283. “But a Broom-stick, perhaps you will say, is an Emblem of a Tree standing on its Head; and pray what is Man but a topsy-turvy Creature? His Animal Faculties perpetually mounted on his Rational; his Head where his Heels should be, groveling on the Earth.”

— Jonathan Swift

284. “All fits of pleasure are balanced by an equal degree of pain and languor; it’s like spending this year part of next year’s revenue.”

— Jonathan Swift

285. “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.”

— Jonathan Swift

286. “Censure is the tax a man pays to the public for being eminent.”

— Jonathan Swift

287. “Wise people are never less alone than when they are alone.”

— Jonathan Swift

288. “One principal object of good-breeding is to suit our behaviour to the three several degrees of men, our superiors, our equals, and those below us.”

— Jonathan Swift

289. “If a lie be believed only for an hour, it hath done its work.”

— Jonathan Swift

290. “Fools are apt to imitate only the defects of their betters.”

— Jonathan Swift

291. “It is the first rule in oratory that a man must appear such as he would persuade others to be: and that can be accomplished only by the force of his life.”

— Jonathan Swift

292. “I should perhaps like others have astonished you with strange improbable tales; but I rather chose to relate plain matter of fact in the simplest manner and style; because my principal design was to inform you, and not to amuse you.”

— Jonathan Swift

293. “I row after health like a waterman...”

— Jonathan Swift

294. “A humour of reading books, except those of devotion or housewifery, is apt to turn a woman’s brain... All affectation of knowledge beyond what is merely domestic, renders them vain, conceited and pretending.”

— Jonathan Swift

295. “Desponding Phyllis was endu’d With ev’ry Talent of a Prude, She trembled when a Man drew near; Salute her, and she turn’d her Ear: If o’er against her you were plac’d She durst not look above your Waist.”

— Jonathan Swift

296. “I rather take this quality to spring from a very common infirmity of human nature, inclining us to be most curious and conceited in matters where we have least concern, and for which we are least adapted by study or nature.”

— Jonathan Swift

297. “111 company is like a dog, who dirts those most whom he loves best.”

— Jonathan Swift

298. “I can discover no political evil in suffering bullies, sharpers, and rakes, to rid the world of each other by a method of their own; where the law hath not been able to find an expedient.”

— Jonathan Swift

299. “No preacher is listened to but time, which gives us the same train and turn of thought that elder people have in vain tried to put into our heads before.”

— Jonathan Swift

300. “Such a man, truly wise, creams off Nature leaving the sour and the dregs for philosophy and reason to lap up.”

— Jonathan Swift