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

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
Folly
Laughing
Humor
Literature
Happy
Men
Laughed

More quotes by Jonathan Swift

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A lie is an excuse guarded
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Had Windham possessed discretion in debate, or Sheridan in conduct, they might have ruled their age.
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There are few, very few, that will own themselves in a mistake.
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All fits of pleasure are balanced by an equal degree of pain or languor it is like spending this year part of the next year's revenue.
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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.
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That the universe was formed by a fortuitous concourse of atoms, I will no more believe than that the accidental jumbling of the alphabet would fall into a most ingenious treatise of philosophy.
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Though Diogenes lived in a tub, there might be, for aught I know, as much pride under his rags, as in the fine-spun garments of the divine Plato.
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The two noblest of things, which are sweetness and light.
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For in reason, all government without the consent of the governed is the very definition of slavery.
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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.
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Tis nothing when you are used to it.
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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.
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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.
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Triumphant Tories, and desponding Whigs, Forget their feuds, and join to save their wigs.
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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.
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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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We have enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love one another.
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That incessant envy wherewith the common rate of mankind pursues all superior natures to their own.
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So geographers, in Africa maps, With savage pictures fill their gaps, And o'er uninhabitable downs Place elephants for want of towns
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Reasoning will never make a man correct an ill opinion, which by reasoning he never acquired
Jonathan Swift