Quote

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.

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
Universe
Accidental
Fall
Alphabet
Science
Ingenious
Believe
Atoms
Would
Formed
Evolution
Concourse
Philosophy
Treatise
Belief
Fortuitous

More quotes by Jonathan Swift

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If the men of wit and genius would resolve never to complain in their works of critics and detractors, the next age would not know that they ever had any.
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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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Very few men, properly speaking, live at present, but are providing to live another time.
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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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Pride, ill nature, and want of sense, are the three great sources of ill manners.
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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 lack of belief is a defect that ought to be concealed when it cannot be overcome.
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It is likewise to be observed that this society hath a peculiar chant and jargon of their own, that no other mortal can understand, and wherein all their laws are written, which they take special care to multiply.
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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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No preacher is listened to but time, which gives us the same train and turn of thought that elder people have in vain tried to put into our heads before.
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If a man would register all his opinions upon love, politics, religion, learning etc., beginning from his youth, and so go to old age, what a bundle of inconsistencies and contradictions would appear at last.
Jonathan Swift
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If a man makes me keep my distance, the comfort is, he keeps his at the same time.
Jonathan Swift
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Once kick the world, and the world and you will live together at a reasonably good understanding.
Jonathan Swift
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Books, the children of the brain.
Jonathan Swift
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Ale is meat, drink and cloth it will make a cat speak and a wise man dumb.
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.
Jonathan Swift
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Reason is a very light rider, and easily shook off.
Jonathan Swift
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It is useless to attempt to reason a man out of a thing he was never reasoned into.
Jonathan Swift
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Fine words! I wonder where you stole them.
Jonathan Swift
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Books, like men their authors, have no more than one wayofcoming intothe world, but there areten thousand to go out of it, and return no more.
Jonathan Swift