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'T is an old maxim in the schools, That flattery 's the food of fools Yet now and then your men of wit Will condescend to take a bit.

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
Schools
Cooking
Fool
Condescend
Bits
Maxim
Food
Maxims
School
Flattery
Take
Fools
Men
Wit

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Tis nothing when you are used to it.
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My horses understand me tolerably well I converse with them at least four hours every day. They are strangers to bridle or saddle they live in great amity with me, and friendship of each other.
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Everybody wants to live forever, but nobody wants to grow old.
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I'll give you leave to call me anything, if you don't call me spade.
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Coffee makes us severe, and grave and philosophical.
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Rebukes are easy from our betters, From men of quality and letters But when low dunces will affront, What man alive can stand the brunt?
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They say fingers were made before forks, and hands before knives.
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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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I cannot imagine why we should be at the expense to furnish wit for succeeding ages, when the former have made no sort of provision for ours.
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Let a man be ne'er so wise, he may be caught with sober lies.
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Faith, that's as well said as if I had said it myself.
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The two maxims of any great man at court are, always to keep his countenance, and never to keep his word.
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Possession, they say, is eleven points of the law.
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What religion is he of? Why, he is an Anythingarian.
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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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The latter part of a wise person's life is occupied with curing the follies, prejudices and false opinions they contracted earlier.
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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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It is pleasant to observe how free the present age is in laying taxes on the next. Future ages shall talk of this they shall be famous to all posterity whereas their time and thoughts will be taken up about present things, as ours are now.
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