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Every man desires to live long, but no man wishes to be old.

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
Wish
Desire
Live
Wishes
Every
Cute
Long
Aging
Men
Desires
Youth
Age

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Conversation is but carving! Give no more to every guest Than he's able to digest.
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Polite Conversation Why, everyone one as they like as the good woman said when she kissed her cow.
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An intelligent person should put money in the beginning, but not in heart
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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.
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He was a bold man that first ate an oyster.
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There are but three ways for a man to revenge himself of the censure of the world,--to despise it, to return the like, or to endeavor to live so as to avoid it the first of these is usually pretended, the last is almost impossible, the universal practice is for the second.
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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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Religion seems to have grown an infant with age, and requires miracles to nurse it, as it had in its infancy.
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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.
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Fond of those hives where folly reigns, And cards and scandal are the chains, Where the pert virgin slights a name, And scorns to redden into shame.
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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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What religion is he of? Why, he is an Anythingarian.
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Men who possess all the advantages of life are in a state where there are many accidents to disorder and discompose, but few to please them.
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All Pretences of foretelling by Astrology, are Deceits for this manifest Reason, because the Wise and Learned, who can only judge whether there be any Truth in this Science, do all unanimously agree to laugh at and despise it and none but the poor ignorant Vulgar give it any Credit.
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Imaginary evils soon become real ones by indulging our reflections on them as he who in a melancholy fancy sees something like a face on the wall or the wainscot can, by two or three touches with a lead pencil, make it look visible, and agreeing with what he fancied.
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It often happens that, if a lie be believed only for an hour, it has done its work, and there is no further occasion for it.
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It is with wits as with razors, which are never so apt to cut those they are employed on as when they have lost their edge.
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A forward critic often dupes us With sham quotations peri hupsos, And if we have not read Longinus, Will magisterially outshine us. Then, lest with Greek he over-run ye, Procure the book for love or money, Translated from Boileau's translation, And quote quotation on quotation.
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It is impossible that anything so natural, so necessary, and so universal as death, should ever have been designed by providence as an evil to mankind.
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Books, like men their authors, have no more than one wayofcoming intothe world, but there areten thousand to go out of it, and return no more.
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