Quote

Good manners is the art of making those people easy with whom we converse. Whoever makes the fewest people uneasy is the best bred in the room.

Jonathan Swift

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Jonathan Swift
Age: 77 †
Born: 1667
Born: November 30
Died: 1745
Died: October 19
Essayist
Human Rights Activist
Novelist
Opinion Journalist
Pamphleteer
Philosopher
Poet
Priest
Prosaist
Public Figure
Dublin city
Isaac Bickerstaff
M. B. Drapier
Lemuel Gulliver
Simon Wagstaff
Good
Room
People
Rooms
Fewest
Literature
Converse
Making
Converses
Easy
Bred
Makes
Uneasy
Art
Whoever
Best
Manners

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Wise people are never less alone than when they are alone.
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Hereditary right should be kept sacred, not from any inalienable right in a particular family, but to avoid the consequences that usually attend the ambition of competitors.
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Fine words! I wonder where you stole them.
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The tucked-up sempstress walks with hasty strides, While streams run down her oil'd umbrella's sides.
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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.
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Philosophy! the lumber of the schools.
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Everyone desires long life, not one old age.
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If a man makes me keep my distance, the comfort is, he keeps his at the same time.
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Blot out, correct, insert, refine, enlarge, diminish, interline. Be mindful, when invention fails. To scratch your head and bite your nails.
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Some dire misfortune to portend, no enemy can match a friend.
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The preaching of divines helps to preserve well-inclined men in the course of virtue, but seldom or ever reclaims the vicious.
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I have known some men possessed of good qualities which were very serviceable to others, but useless to themselves like a sun-dial on the front of a house, to inform the neighbours and passengers, but not the owner within.
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I'll give you leave to call me anything, if you don't call me spade.
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There is no quality so contrary to any nature which one cannot affect, and put on upon occasion, in order to serve an interest.
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A Child will make two Dishes at an Entertainment for Friends and when the Family dines alone, the fore or hind Quarter will makea reasonable Dish and seasoned with a little Pepper or Salt, will be very good Boiled on the fourth Day, especially in Winter.
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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.
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Politics, as the word is commonly understood, are nothing but corruptions.
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A lie is an excuse guarded
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A jargon form'd from the lost language, wit, Confounded in that Babel of the pit Form'd by diseased conceptions, weak and wild, Sick lust of souls, and an abortive child Born between whores and fops, by lewd compacts, Before the play, or else between the acts Nor wonder, if from such polluted minds Should spring such short and transitory kinds.
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Whoever makes the fewest persons uneasy, is the best bred man in company.
Jonathan Swift