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All fits of pleasure are balanced by an equal degree of pain or languor it is like spending this year part of the next year's revenue.

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
Years
Equal
Languor
Like
Joy
Fits
Pleasure
Revenue
Year
Balanced
Happiness
Degree
Pain
Fit
Next
Spending
Part
Degrees

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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Simplicity, without which no human performance can arrive at perfection.
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In all I wish, how happy should I be, Thou grand Deluder, were it not for thee? So weak thou art that fools thy power despise And yet so strong, thou triumph'st o'er the wise.
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Kitchen Physic is the best Physic.
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I never wonder to see men wicked, but I often wonder to see them not ashamed.
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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.
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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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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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A fig for your bill of fare show me your bill of company.
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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.
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What we call the Irish Brogue is no sooner discovered, than it makes the deliverer, in the last degree, ridiculous and despised and, from such a mouth, an Englishman expects nothing but bulls, blunders, and follies.
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He was a fiddler, and consequently a rogue.
Jonathan Swift
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Ah, a German and a genius ! A prodigy, admit him !
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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.
Jonathan Swift
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They say fingers were made before forks, and hands before knives.
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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
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I won't quarrel with my bread and butter.
Jonathan Swift
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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.
Jonathan Swift
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It is very unfair in any writer to employ ignorance and malice together, because it gives his answerer double work.
Jonathan Swift
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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.
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