Quote

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.

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
Read
Passages
Mistaken
Excellently
Author
Agrees
Criticism
Pronounce
Mines
Disagreement
Mine
Differ
Agree
Passage
Opinion
Observed

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A college joke to cure the dumps.
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Tis nothing when you are used to it.
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There's none so blind as they that won't see.
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All panegyrics are mingled with an infusion of poppy.
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There is no vice or folly that requires so much nicety and skill to manage as vanity nor any which by ill management makes so contemptible a figure.
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The system of morality to be gathered from the ancient sages falls very short of that delivered in the gospel.
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My father had a small Estate in Nottinghamshire I was the Third of five Sons.
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The first springs of great events, like those of great rivers, are often mean and little.
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How often do we contradict the right rules of reason in the whole course of our lives! Reason itself is true and just, but the reason of every particular man is weak and wavering, perpetually swayed and turned by his interests, his passions, and his vices.
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We are so fond on one another because our ailments are the same.
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Would a writer know how to behave himself with relation td posterity? Let him consider in old books what he finds that he is glad to know, and what omissions he most laments.
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If a man would register all his opinions upon love, politics, religion, learning etc., beginning from his youth, and so go to old age, what a bundle of inconsistencies and contradictions would appear at last.
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A lie is an excuse guarded
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Old men and comets have been reverenced for the same reason: their long beards, and pretences to foretell events.
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Pride, ill nature, and want of sense are the three great sources of ill manners without some one of these defects, no man will behave himself ill for want of experience, or what, in the language of fools, is called knowing the world.
Jonathan Swift
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Promises and pie-crust are made to be broken.
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Pride, ill nature, and want of sense, are the three great sources of ill manners.
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Love why do we one passion call, When 'tis a compound of them all? Where hot and cold, where sharp and sweet, In all their equipages meet Where pleasures mix'd with pains appear, Sorrow with joy, and hope with fear.
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Hereditary right should be kept sacred, not from any inalienable right in a particular family, but to avoid the consequences that usually attend the ambition of competitors.
Jonathan Swift
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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.
Jonathan Swift