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
Best
Manners
Good
Room
People
Rooms
Fewest
Literature
Converse
Making
Converses
Easy
Bred
Makes
Uneasy
Art
Whoever

More quotes by Jonathan Swift

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The more careless, the more modish.
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I would rather be a freeman among slaves than a slave among freemen.
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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.
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You should never be ashamed to admit you have been wrong. It only proves you are wiser today than yesterday
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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.
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Pray steal me not, I'm Mrs. Dingley's, Whose heart in this four-footed thing lies.
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Men are happy to be laughed at for their humor, but not for their folly.
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Surely mortal man is a broomstick!
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Poor nations are hungry, and rich nations are proud and pride and hunger will ever be at variance.
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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.
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In church your grandsire cut his throat to do the job too long he tarried: he should have had my hearty vote to cut his throat before he married.
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Ale is meat, drink and cloth it will make a cat speak and a wise man dumb.
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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.
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Conversation is but carving! Give no more to every guest Than he's able to digest.
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My nose itched, and I knew I should drink wine or kiss a fool.
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You can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear.
Jonathan Swift
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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
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I cannot imagine why we should be at the expense to furnish wit for succeeding ages, when the former have made no sort of provision for ours.
Jonathan Swift
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Words are but wind and learning is nothing but words ergo, learning is nothing but wind.
Jonathan Swift
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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