Quote

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.

Jonathan Swift

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Take
Respect
Deceived
Shall
Perpetual
Either
Definition
Understanding
Possession
Happiness
Generally
Adjuncts
Find
Senses
Herd
Wells
Understood
Properties
Well
Short
Examination

More quotes by Jonathan Swift

Image
Few are qualified to shine in company, but it is in most men's power to be agreeable.
Jonathan Swift
Image
Daphne knows, with equal ease, How to vex and how to please But the folly of her sex Makes her sole delight to vex.
Jonathan Swift
Image
You can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear.
Jonathan Swift
Image
In men desire begets love, and in women love begets desire.
Jonathan Swift
Image
It is an uncontrolled truth, that no man ever made an ill figure who understood his own talents, nor a good one who mistook them.
Jonathan Swift
Image
Men are happy to be laughed at for their humor, but not for their folly.
Jonathan Swift
Image
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.
Jonathan Swift
Image
If a man will observe as he walks the streets, I believe he will find the merriest countenances in mourning coaches.
Jonathan Swift
Image
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
Image
Unjustly poets we asperse: Truth shines the brighter clad in verse, And all the fictions they pursue Do but insinuate what is true.
Jonathan Swift
Image
Ale is meat, drink and cloth it will make a cat speak and a wise man dumb.
Jonathan Swift
Image
There is nothing constant in this world but inconsistency.
Jonathan Swift
Image
Men of great parts are often unfortunate in the management of public business, because they are apt to go out of the common road by the quickness of their imagination.
Jonathan Swift
Image
Whoever makes the fewest persons uneasy, is the best bred man in company.
Jonathan Swift
Image
May you live all the days of your life.
Jonathan Swift
Image
There's none so blind as they that won't see.
Jonathan Swift
Image
I would rather be a freeman among slaves than a slave among freemen.
Jonathan Swift
Image
In like manner, the disbelief of a Divine Providence renders a man uncapable of holding any public station for, since kings avow themselves to be the deputies of Providence.
Jonathan Swift
Image
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.
Jonathan Swift
Image
There are but three ways for a man to revenge himself of the censure of the world,--to despise it, to return the like, or to endeavor to live so as to avoid it the first of these is usually pretended, the last is almost impossible, the universal practice is for the second.
Jonathan Swift