Quote

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

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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
Whatever
Thus
Dirt
Rather
Infinite
Honey
Culture
Labor
Corner
Nature
Difference
Poison
Furnishing
Two
Mankind
Fill
Ranging
Light
Instead
Corners
Hives
Every
Rest
Search
Noblest
Things
Differences
Chosen
Sweetness

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There are few wild beasts more to be dreaded than a talking man having nothing to say.
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It often happens that, if a lie be believed only for an hour, it has done its work, and there is no further occasion for it.
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Religion seems to have grown an infant with age, and requires miracles to nurse it, as it had in its infancy.
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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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The more careless, the more modish.
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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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There is no quality so contrary to any nature which one cannot affect, and put on upon occasion, in order to serve an interest.
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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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One enemy can do more hurt than ten friends can do good.
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It is a maxim, that those, to whom everybody allows the second place, have an undoubted title to the first.
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I'm up and down and round about, Yet all the world can't find me out Though hundreds have employed their leisure, They never yet could find my measure.
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O Grub Street! how do I bemoan thee, whose graceless children scorn to own thee! . Yet thou hast greater cause to be ashamed of them, than they of thee.
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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.
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Argument, as usually managed, is the worst sort of conversation, as it is generally in books the worst sort of reading.
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I'll give you leave to call me anything, if you don't call me spade.
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Come, agree, the law's costly.
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If the world had but a dozen Arbuthnots in it, I would burn my Travels.
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Had Windham possessed discretion in debate, or Sheridan in conduct, they might have ruled their age.
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No man will take counsel, but every man will take money. Therefore, money is better than counsel.
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It is the first rule in oratory that a man must appear such as he would persuade others to be: and that can be accomplished only by the force of his life.
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