Quote

Men who possess all the advantages of life are in a state where there are many accidents to disorder and discompose, but few to please them.

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
Accidents
Advantage
Please
State
States
Many
Advantages
Men
Disorder
Life
Possess

More quotes by Jonathan Swift

Image
Lose no time to contradict her, Nor endeavor to convict her Only take this rule along, Always to advise her wrong, And reprove her when she's right She may then grow wise for spite.
Jonathan Swift
Image
Once kick the world, and the world and you will live together at a reasonably good understanding.
Jonathan Swift
Image
What they do in heaven we are ignorant of what they do not do we are told expressly.
Jonathan Swift
Image
May you live all the days of your life.
Jonathan Swift
Image
Vision is seeing the invisible.
Jonathan Swift
Image
One enemy can do more hurt than ten friends can do good.
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
Men are happy to be laughed at for their humor, but not for their folly.
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
Blot out, correct, insert, refine, enlarge, diminish, interline. Be mindful, when invention fails. To scratch your head and bite your nails.
Jonathan Swift
Image
What vexes me most is, that my female friends, who could bear me very well a dozen years ago, have now forsaken me, although I am not so old in proportion to them as I formerly was: which I can prove by arithmetic, for then I was double their age, which now I am not. Letter to Alexander Pope. 7 Feb. 1736.
Jonathan Swift
Image
In all distresses of our friends We first consult our private ends While Nature, kindly bent to ease us, Points out some circumstance to please us.
Jonathan Swift
Image
When we desire or solicit anything, our minds run wholly on the good side or circumstances of it when it is obtained, our minds run wholly on the bad ones.
Jonathan Swift
Image
Argument, as usually managed, is the worst sort of conversation, as it is generally in books the worst sort of reading.
Jonathan Swift
Image
Some dire misfortune to portend, no enemy can match a friend.
Jonathan Swift
Image
Simplicity, without which no human performance can arrive at perfection.
Jonathan Swift
Image
I'm as old as my tongue and a little older than my teeth.
Jonathan Swift
Image
Promises and pie-crust are made to be broken.
Jonathan Swift
Image
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.
Jonathan Swift
Image
When a true genius appears, you can know him by this sign: that all the dunces are in a confederacy against him.
Jonathan Swift