Quote

Everybody wants to live forever, but nobody wants to grow old.

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
Everybody
Forever
Age
Live
Nobody
Grow
Wants
Grows

More quotes by Jonathan Swift

Image
The first springs of great events, like those of great rivers, are often mean and little.
Jonathan Swift
Image
A Child will make two Dishes at an Entertainment for Friends and when the Family dines alone, the fore or hind Quarter will makea reasonable Dish and seasoned with a little Pepper or Salt, will be very good Boiled on the fourth Day, especially in Winter.
Jonathan Swift
Image
Triumphant Tories, and desponding Whigs, Forget their feuds, and join to save their wigs.
Jonathan Swift
Image
With a whirl of thought oppressed I sink from reverie to rest. An horrid vision seized my head, I saw the graves give up their dead.
Jonathan Swift
Image
Do you think I was born in a wood to be afraid of an owl?
Jonathan Swift
Image
Imaginary evils soon become real ones by indulging our reflections on them as he who in a melancholy fancy sees something like a face on the wall or the wainscot can, by two or three touches with a lead pencil, make it look visible, and agreeing with what he fancied.
Jonathan Swift
Image
Very few men, properly speaking, live at present, but are providing to live another time.
Jonathan Swift
Image
Where I am not understood, it shall be concluded that something very useful and profound is couched underneath.
Jonathan Swift
Image
It is not so much the being exempt from faults as the having overcome them that is an advantage to us it being with the follies of the mind as with weeds of a field, which if destroyed and consumed upon the place where they grow, enrich and improve it more than if none had ever sprung there.
Jonathan Swift
Image
Books, the children of the brain.
Jonathan Swift
Image
That incessant envy wherewith the common rate of mankind pursues all superior natures to their own.
Jonathan Swift
Image
Small causes are sufficient to make a man uneasy, when great ones are not in the way: for want of a block he will stumble at a straw.
Jonathan Swift
Image
I remember it was with extreme difficulty that I could bring my master to understand the meaning of the word opinion, or how a point could be disputable because reason taught us to affirm or deny only where we are certain and beyond our knowledge we cannot do either.
Jonathan Swift
Image
Careful observers may foretell the hour (By sure prognostics) when to dread a show'r. While rain depends, the pensive cat gives o'er Her frolics, and pursues her tail no more.
Jonathan Swift
Image
It is useless to attempt to reason a man out of a thing he was never reasoned into.
Jonathan Swift
Image
A carpenter is known by his chips.
Jonathan Swift
Image
For the rest, whatever we have got has been by infinite labor, and search, and ranging through every corner of nature the difference is that instead of dirt and poison, we have rather chosen to fill our hives with honey and wax, thus furnishing mankind with the two noblest of things, which are sweetness and light.
Jonathan Swift
Image
Words are but wind and learning is nothing but words ergo, learning is nothing but wind.
Jonathan Swift
Image
Rebukes are easy from our betters, From men of quality and letters But when low dunces will affront, What man alive can stand the brunt?
Jonathan Swift
Image
Surely mortal man is a broomstick!
Jonathan Swift