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
Argument
Conversation
Usually
Worst
Sort
Books
Reading
Managed
Book
Generally

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Triumphant Tories, and desponding Whigs, Forget their feuds, and join to save their wigs.
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Hereditary right should be kept sacred, not from any inalienable right in a particular family, but to avoid the consequences that usually attend the ambition of competitors.
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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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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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It is with wits as with razors, which are never so apt to cut those they are employed on as when they have lost their edge.
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Cruel people are ever cowards in emergency.
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I row after health like a waterman.
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That incessant envy wherewith the common rate of mankind pursues all superior natures to their own.
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Liberty of conscience is nowadays only understood to be the liberty of believing what men please, but also of endeavoring to propagate that belief as much as they can.
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For though, in nature, depth and height Are equally held infinite: In poetry, the height we know 'Tis only infinite below.
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Small causes are sufficient to make a man uneasy, when great ones are not in the way: for want of a block he will stumble at a straw.
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What they do in heaven we are ignorant of what they do not do we are told expressly.
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Vision is the Art of seeing Things invisible.
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A jargon form'd from the lost language, wit, Confounded in that Babel of the pit Form'd by diseased conceptions, weak and wild, Sick lust of souls, and an abortive child Born between whores and fops, by lewd compacts, Before the play, or else between the acts Nor wonder, if from such polluted minds Should spring such short and transitory kinds.
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Reasoning will never make a man correct an ill opinion, which by reasoning he never acquired
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Two friendships in two breasts requires The same aversions and desires.
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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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Pride, ill nature, and want of sense are the three great sources of ill manners without some one of these defects, no man will behave himself ill for want of experience, or what, in the language of fools, is called knowing the world.
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Tis nothing when you are used to it.
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They say fingers were made before forks, and hands before knives.
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