Top 400 Jonathan Swift Quotes (2025 Update)
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351. “Religion seems to have grown an infant with age, and requires miracles to nurse it, as it had in its infancy.”

— Jonathan Swift

352. “I durst make no return to this malicious insinuation, which debased human understanding below the sagacity of a common hound, who has judgment enough to distinguish and follow the cry of the ablest dog in the pack, without being ever mistaken.”

— Jonathan Swift

353. “Though fear should lend him pinions like the wind, yet swifter fate will seize him from behind.”

— Jonathan Swift

354. “I know Sir John will go, though he was sure it would rain cats and dogs.”

— Jonathan Swift

355. “The nurse, to quiet her babe, made use of a rattle which was a kind of hollow vessel filled with great stones, and fastened by a cable to the child’s waist: but all in vain; so that she was forced to apply the last remedy by giving it suck.”

— Jonathan Swift

356. “Under the rose, since here are none but friends, To own the truth we have some private ends.”

— Jonathan Swift

357. “Two days after this adventure, the emperor, having ordered that part of his army which quarters in and about his metropolis, to be in readiness, took a fancy of diverting himself in a very singular manner. He desired I would stand like a Colossus, with my legs as far asunder as I conveniently could.”

— Jonathan Swift

358. “They have a notion, that when people are met together, a short silence does much improve conversation: this I found to be true; for during those little intermissions of talk, new ideas would arise in their minds, which very much enlivened the discourse.”

— Jonathan Swift

359. “If a struldbrug happen to marry one of his own kind, the marriage is dissolved of course, by the courtesy of the kingdom, as soon as the younger of the two comes to be fourscore; for the law thinks it a reasonable indulgence, that those who are condemned, without any fault of their own, to a perpetual continuance in the world, should not have their misery doubled by the load of a wife. “As.”

— Jonathan Swift

360. “Story-telling is subject to two unavoidable defects, – frequent repetition and being soon exhausted; so that, whoever values this gift in himself, has need of a good memory, and ought frequently to shift his company.”

— Jonathan Swift

361. “Arbitrary power is but the first natural step from anarchy, or the savage life.”

— Jonathan Swift

362. “For this kind of commodity will not bear exportation, the flesh being of too tender a consistence to admit a long continuance in salt, although perhaps I could name a country which would be glad to eat up our whole nation without it.”

— Jonathan Swift

363. “Brisk talkers are generally slow thinkers.”

— Jonathan Swift

364. “Punning is a talent which no man affects to despise but he that is without it.”

— Jonathan Swift

365. “I could not sufficiently wonder at the intrepidity of these diminutive mortals, who.”

— Jonathan Swift

366. “Some time after, asking a friend at court how they came to fix on that determinate number, he told me that his majesty’s mathematicians, having taken the height of my body by the help of a quadrant, and finding it to exceed theirs in the proportion of twelve to one, they concluded from the similarity of their bodies, that mine must contain at least 1724 of theirs, and consequently would require as much food as was necessary to support that number of Lilliputians. By.”

— Jonathan Swift

367. “Faith, that’s as well said as if I had said it myself.”

— Jonathan Swift

368. “But you think that it is time for me to have done with the world, and so I would if I could get into a better before I was called into the best, and not die here in a rage, like a poisoned rat in a hole.”

— Jonathan Swift

369. “Perpetual aiming at wit is a very bad part of conversation. It is done to support a character: it generally fails; it is a sort of insult on the company, and a restraint upon the speaker.”

— Jonathan Swift

370. “If the men of wit and genius would resolve never to complain in their works of critics and detractors, the next age would not know that they ever had any.”

— Jonathan Swift

371. “I am of the level with common Astrologers; who, with an old paltry cant, and a few pot-hooks for planets to amuse the vulgar, have too long been suffered to abuse the world.”

— Jonathan Swift

372. “Physicians ought not to give their judgment of religion, for the same reason that butchers are not admitted to be jurors upon life and death.”

— Jonathan Swift

373. “He had therefore begun to think it not unwise in us to cover our bodies, and by that invention conceal many of our deformities from each other, which would else be hardly supportable.”

— Jonathan Swift

374. “I am convinced that if the virtuosi could once find out a world in the moon, with a passage to it, our women would wear nothing but what directly came from thence.”

— Jonathan Swift

375. “I never knew any man cured of inattention.”

— Jonathan Swift

376. “The scholars of Ireland seem not to have the least conception of style, but run on in a flat phraseology, often mingled with barbarous terms.”

— Jonathan Swift

377. “Just get the right syllable in the proper place.”

— Jonathan Swift

378. “Great abilities, when employed as God directs, do but make the owners of them greater and more painful servants to their neighbors.”

— Jonathan Swift

379. “Rhetoric in serious discourses is like the flowers in corn; pleasing to those who come only for amusement, but prejudicial to him who would reap profit from it.”

— Jonathan Swift

380. “Your onions should be thoroughly boiled.”

— Jonathan Swift

381. “The affectation of some late authors to introduce and multiply cant words is the most ruinous corruption in any language.”

— Jonathan Swift

382. “The axe of intemperance has lopped off his green boughs and left him a withered trunk.”

— Jonathan Swift

383. “A maxim in law has more weight in the world than an article of faith.”

— Jonathan Swift

384. “The reader may remember, that when I signed those articles upon which I recovered my liberty, there were some which I disliked, upon account of their being too servile; neither.”

— Jonathan Swift

385. “An atheist has got one point beyond the devil.”

— Jonathan Swift

386. “Would a writer know how to behave himself with relation td posterity? Let him consider in old books what he finds that he is glad to know, and what omissions he most laments.”

— Jonathan Swift

387. “What they do in heaven we are ignorant of; what they do not do we are told expressly.”

— Jonathan Swift

388. “I never saw, heard, nor read, that the clergy were beloved in any nation where Christianity was the religion of the country. Nothing can render them popular, but some degree of persecution.”

— Jonathan Swift

389. “A wise man will find us to be rogues by our faces.”

— Jonathan Swift

390. “From this time my constant practice was, as soon as I rose, to perform that business in open air, at the full extent of my chain; and due care was taken every morning before company came, that the offensive matter should be carried off in wheel-barrows, by two servants appointed for that purpose. I.”

— Jonathan Swift

391. “They all agreed, that I could not be produced according to the regular laws of nature; because I was not framed with a capacity of preserving my life, either by swiftness, or climbing of trees, or digging holes in the earth.”

— Jonathan Swift

392. “Dignity, high station, or great riches, are in some sort necessary to old men, in order to keep the younger at a distance, who are otherwise too apt to insult them upon the score of their age.”

— Jonathan Swift

393. “And he gave it for his opinion, “that whoever could make two ears of corn, or two blades of grass, to grow upon a spot of ground where only one grew before, would deserve better of mankind, and do more essential service to his country, than the whole race of politicians put together.”

— Jonathan Swift

394. “And, is not Virtue in Mankind The Nutriment that feeds the Mind?”

— Jonathan Swift

395. “By the laws of God, of nature, of nations, and of your country you are and ought to be as free a people as your brethren in England.”

— Jonathan Swift

396. “The preaching of divines helps to preserve well-inclined men in the course of virtue, but seldom or ever reclaims the vicious.”

— Jonathan Swift

397. “It may pass for a maxim in State, that the administration cannot be placed in too few hands, nor the legislature in too many.”

— Jonathan Swift

398. “Nothing is so great an instance of ill-manners as flattery.”

— Jonathan Swift

399. “Ay, do despise me, I’m the prouder for it; I like to be despised.”

— Jonathan Swift

400. “The translators of the Bible were masters of an English style much fitter for that work than any we see in our present writings; the which is owing to the simplicity that runs through the whole.”

— Jonathan Swift