Quote

Argument, as usually managed, is the worst sort of conversation, as it is generally in books the worst sort of reading.

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
Book
Generally
Argument
Conversation
Usually
Worst
Sort
Books
Reading
Managed

More quotes by Jonathan Swift

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A fig for your bill of fare show me your bill of company.
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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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You can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear.
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Do you think I was born in a wood to be afraid of an owl?
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Cruel people are ever cowards in emergency.
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Conscience signifies that knowledge which a man hath of his own thoughts and actions and because, if a man judgeth fairly of his actions by comparing them with the law of God, his mind will approve or condemn him this knowledge or conscience may be both an accuser and a judge.
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I never knew any man cured of inattention.
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Last week I saw a woman flayed, and you will hardly believe, how much it altered her person for the worse.
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You cannot reason a person out of something they were not reasoned into.
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One principal object of good-breeding is to suit our behaviour to the three several degrees of men, our superiors, our equals, and those below us.
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Pedantry is properly the over-rating of any kind of knowledge we pretend to.
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May you live all the days of your life.
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It is a maxim, that those, to whom everybody allows the second place, have an undoubted title to the first.
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If you were not reasoned into your beliefs, you cannot be reasoned out of them.
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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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A forward critic often dupes us With sham quotations peri hupsos, And if we have not read Longinus, Will magisterially outshine us. Then, lest with Greek he over-run ye, Procure the book for love or money, Translated from Boileau's translation, And quote quotation on quotation.
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Old men and comets have been reverenced for the same reason: their long beards, and pretences to foretell events.
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The stoical scheme of supplying our wants by lopping off our desires, is like cutting off our feet when we want shoes.
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Books, the children of the brain.
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I shall be like that tree-I shall die at the top.
Jonathan Swift