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It is a maxim, that those, to whom everybody allows the second place, have an undoubted title to the first.

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
Titles
Allows
Second
Everybody
Class
Undoubted
Place
Maxim
Firsts
Maxims
First
Title

More quotes by Jonathan Swift

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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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If a man makes me keep my distance, the comfort is, he keeps his at the same time.
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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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An atheist has got one point beyond the devil.
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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.
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Although men are accused of not knowing their own weakness, yet perhaps few know their own strength. It is in men as in soils, where sometimes there is a vein of gold which the owner knows not of.
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A traveler's chief aim should be to make men wiser and better, and to improve their minds by the bad-as well as good example of what they deliver concerning foreign places.
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The first springs of great events, like those of great rivers, are often mean and little.
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I never saw, heard, nor read, that the clergy were beloved in any nation where Christianity was the religion of the country. Nothing can render them popular, but some degree of persecution.
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Many a truth is told in jest.
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I am convinced that if the virtuosi could once find out a world in the moon, with a passage to it, our women would wear nothing but what directly came from thence.
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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.
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Blot out, correct, insert, refine, enlarge, diminish, interline. Be mindful, when invention fails. To scratch your head and bite your nails.
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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.
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But you think that it is time for me to have done with the world, and so I would if I could get into a better before I was called into the best, and not die here in a rage, like a poisoned rat in a hole.
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Fond of those hives where folly reigns, And cards and scandal are the chains, Where the pert virgin slights a name, And scorns to redden into shame.
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Had Windham possessed discretion in debate, or Sheridan in conduct, they might have ruled their age.
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You must take the will for the deed.
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By candle-light nobody would have taken you for above five-and-twenty.
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There is nothing constant in this world but inconsistency.
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