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Where I am not understood, it shall be concluded that something very useful and profound is couched underneath.

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
Shall
Literature
Understanding
Couched
Something
Concluded
Underneath
Useful
Profound
Understood

More quotes by Jonathan Swift

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It is a maxim, that those, to whom everybody allows the second place, have an undoubted title to the first.
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Two women seldom grow intimate but at the expense of a third person.
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There's none so blind as they that won't see.
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Philosophy! the lumber of the schools.
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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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And, is not Virtue in Mankind The Nutriment that feeds the Mind?
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A little grain of the romance is no ill ingredient to preserve and exalt the dignity of human nature, without which it is apt to degenerate into everything that is sordid, vicious and low.
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My nose itched, and I knew I should drink wine or kiss a fool.
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War: that mad game the world so loves to play.
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I always love to begin a journey on Sundays, because I shall have the prayers of the church to preserve all that travel by land, or water.
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Vision is seeing the invisible.
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Vanity is a mark of humility rather than of pride.
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They say fingers were made before forks, and hands before knives.
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They say fish should swim thrice * * * first it should swim in the sea (do you mind me?) then it should swim in butter, and at last, sirrah, it should swim in good claret.
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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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When we desire or solicit anything, our minds run wholly on the good side or circumstances of it when it is obtained, our minds run wholly on the bad ones.
Jonathan Swift
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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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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.
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You cannot reason a person out of something they were not reasoned into.
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I never knew any man cured of inattention.
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