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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
Laughed
Folly
Laughing
Humor
Literature
Happy
Men

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111 company is like a dog, who dirts those most whom he loves best.
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A fig for your bill of fare show me your bill of company.
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In oratory the greatest art is to hide art.
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Possession, they say, is eleven points of the law.
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What they do in heaven we are ignorant of what they do not do we are told expressly.
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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.
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A wise man will find us to be rogues by our faces.
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Unjustly poets we asperse: Truth shines the brighter clad in verse, And all the fictions they pursue Do but insinuate what is true.
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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.
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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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Ever eating, never cloying, All-devouring, all-destroying Never finding full repast, Till I eat the world at last.
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I shall be like that tree-I shall die at the top.
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Argument, as usually managed, is the worst sort of conversation, as it is generally in books the worst sort of reading.
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They say fingers were made before forks, and hands before knives.
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He was a fiddler, and consequently a rogue.
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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.
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Politics, as the word is commonly understood, are nothing but corruptions.
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That was excellently observed’, say I, when I read a passage in an author, where his opinion agrees with mine. When we differ, there I pronounce him to be mistaken.
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I never knew any man cured of inattention.
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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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