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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

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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
Ones
Side
Solicit
Sides
Obtained
Desire
Avarice
Running
Wholly
Anything
Greed
Mind
Minds
Good
Circumstances

More quotes by 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.
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Pray steal me not, I'm Mrs. Dingley's, Whose heart in this four-footed thing lies.
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Good manners is the art of making those people easy with whom we converse. Whoever makes the fewest people uneasy is the best bred in the room.
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Few are qualified to shine in company, but it is in most men's power to be agreeable.
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They say fish should swim thrice * * * first it should swim in the sea (do you mind me?) then it should swim in butter, and at last, sirrah, it should swim in good claret.
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Men of wit, learning and virtue might strike out every offensive or unbecoming passage from plays.
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No man was ever so completely skilled in the conduct of life, as not to receive new information from age and experience.
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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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So, naturalists observe, a flea Hath smaller fleas that on him prey And these have smaller fleas to bite 'em, And so proceed ad infinitum.
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I never wonder to see men wicked, but I often wonder to see them not ashamed.
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There is no vice or folly that requires so much nicety and skill to manage as vanity nor any which by ill management makes so contemptible a figure.
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I'm as old as my tongue and a little older than my teeth.
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It may pass for a maxim in State, that the administration cannot be placed in too few hands, nor the legislature in too many.
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Philosophy! the lumber of the schools.
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Flattery is the worst and falsest way of showing our esteem.
Jonathan Swift
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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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The best Maxim I know in this life is, to drink your Coffee when you can, and when you cannot, to be easy without it. While you continue to be splenetic, count upon it I will always preach. Thus much I sympathize with you that I am not cheerful enough to write, for I believe Coffee once a week is necessary to that.
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Simplicity, without which no human performance can arrive at perfection.
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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I hate nobody: I am in charity with the world.
Jonathan Swift