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If a man makes me keep my distance, the comfort is, he keeps his at the same time.

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
Keep
Men
Time
Keeps
Distance
Comfort
Makes

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The more careless, the more modish.
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Words are but wind and learning is nothing but words ergo, learning is nothing but wind.
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In all distresses of our friends We first consult our private ends While Nature, kindly bent to ease us, Points out some circumstance to please us.
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I'm as old as my tongue and a little older than my teeth.
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Men of wit, learning and virtue might strike out every offensive or unbecoming passage from plays.
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For to enter the palace of learning at the great gate requires an expense of time and forms, therefore men of much haste and little ceremony are content to get in by the back-door
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Fine words! I wonder where you stole them.
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I hate nobody: I am in charity with the world.
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They say fingers were made before forks, and hands before knives.
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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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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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Fools are apt to imitate only the defects of their betters.
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Everybody wants to live forever, but nobody wants to grow old.
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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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It may pass for a maxim in State, that the administration cannot be placed in too few hands, nor the legislature in too many.
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There is nothing in this world constant, but inconstancy.
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A jargon form'd from the lost language, wit, Confounded in that Babel of the pit Form'd by diseased conceptions, weak and wild, Sick lust of souls, and an abortive child Born between whores and fops, by lewd compacts, Before the play, or else between the acts Nor wonder, if from such polluted minds Should spring such short and transitory kinds.
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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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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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Then, rising with Aurora's light, The Muse invoked, sit down to write Blot out, correct, insert, refine, Enlarge, diminish, interline.
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