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This made me reflect, how vain an attempt it is for a man to endeavor to do himself honor among those who are out of all degree of equality or comparison with him.

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
Men
Attempt
Equality
Vain
Degree
Degrees
Honor
Reflect
Among
Comparison
Made
Endeavor

More quotes by Jonathan Swift

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Such a man, truly wise, creams off Nature leaving the sour and the dregs for philosophy and reason to lap up.
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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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A college joke to cure the dumps.
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The affectation of some late authors to introduce and multiply cant words is the most ruinous corruption in any language.
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All panegyrics are mingled with an infusion of poppy.
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For, if we take an examination of what is generally understood by happiness, as it has respect either to the understanding or the senses, we shall find all its properties and adjuncts will herd under this short definition: that it is a perpetual possession of being well deceived.
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Positiveness is a good quality for preachers and speakers because, whoever shares his thoughts with the public will convince them as he himself appears convinced.
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He was a fiddler, and consequently a rogue.
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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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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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Hail fellow, well met.
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You should never be ashamed to admit you have been wrong. It only proves you are wiser today than yesterday
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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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The tucked-up sempstress walks with hasty strides, While streams run down her oil'd umbrella's sides.
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I shall be like that tree-I shall die at the top.
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God hath intended our passions to prevail over reason.
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Triumphant Tories, and desponding Whigs, Forget their feuds, and join to save their wigs.
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A wise man will find us to be rogues by our faces.
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Pedantry is properly the over-rating of any kind of knowledge we pretend to.
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Ingratitude is amongst them a capital crime, as we read it to have been in some other countries: for they reason thus that whoever makes ill-returns to his benefactor, must needs be a common enemy to the rest of the mankind, from where he has received no obligations and therefore such man is not fit to live.
Jonathan Swift