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A ridiculous passion which hath no being but in play-books and romances.

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
Ridiculous
Books
Passion
Book
Play
Love
Romances
Hath
Romance

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In men desire begets love, and in women love begets desire.
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They say fingers were made before forks, and hands before knives.
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Men of great parts are often unfortunate in the management of public business, because they are apt to go out of the common road by the quickness of their imagination.
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Ah, a German and a genius ! A prodigy, admit him !
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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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When a true genius appears, you can know him by this sign: that all the dunces are in a confederacy against him.
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There's none so blind as they that won't see.
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Vanity is a mark of humility rather than of pride.
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In like manner, the disbelief of a Divine Providence renders a man uncapable of holding any public station for, since kings avow themselves to be the deputies of Providence.
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I wonder what fool it was that first invented kissing.
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Politics, as the word is commonly understood, are nothing but corruptions.
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What we call the Irish Brogue is no sooner discovered, than it makes the deliverer, in the last degree, ridiculous and despised and, from such a mouth, an Englishman expects nothing but bulls, blunders, and follies.
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No man of honor, as the word is usually understood, did ever pretend that his honor obliged him to be chaste or temperate, to pay his creditors, to be useful to his country, to do good to mankind, to endeavor to be wise or learned, to regard his word, his promise, or his oath.
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You should never be ashamed to admit you have been wrong. It only proves you are wiser today than yesterday
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Come, agree, the law's costly.
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There are but three ways for a man to revenge himself of the censure of the world,--to despise it, to return the like, or to endeavor to live so as to avoid it the first of these is usually pretended, the last is almost impossible, the universal practice is for the second.
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My Lawyer being practiced almost from his Cradle in defending Falsehood is quite out of his Element when he would be an Advocate for Justice, which as an Office unnatural, he always attempts with great Awkwardness if not with Ill-will.
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Argument, as usually managed, is the worst sort of conversation, as it is generally in books the worst sort of reading.
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There is nothing constant in this world but inconsistency.
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The system of morality to be gathered from the ancient sages falls very short of that delivered in the gospel.
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