Quote

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.

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
Mathematics
Insects
Ads
Infinitum
Prey
Naturalists
Bites
Flea
Ems
Naturalist
Observe
Fleas
Smaller
Proceed
Hath
Bite

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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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Pedantry is properly the over-rating of any kind of knowledge we pretend to.
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Satire, being levelled at all, is never resented for an offence by any.
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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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Vision is seeing the invisible.
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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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Ingratitude is amongst them a capital crime, as we read it to have been in some other countries: for they reason thus that whoever makes ill-returns to his benefactor, must needs be a common enemy to the rest of the mankind, from where he has received no obligations and therefore such man is not fit to live.
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I forget whether advice be among the lost things which Ariosto says are to be found in the moon: that and time ought to have been there.
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All panegyrics are mingled with an infusion of poppy.
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Poor nations are hungry, and rich nations are proud and pride and hunger will ever be at variance.
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It is useless to attempt to reason a man out of a thing he was never reasoned into.
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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.
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One enemy can do more hurt than ten friends can do good.
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Love why do we one passion call, When 'tis a compound of them all? Where hot and cold, where sharp and sweet, In all their equipages meet Where pleasures mix'd with pains appear, Sorrow with joy, and hope with fear.
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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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A ridiculous passion which hath no being but in play-books and romances.
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Nothing is so hard for those who abound in riches as to conceive how others can be in want.
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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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By candle-light nobody would have taken you for above five-and-twenty.
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A nice man is a man of nasty ideas.
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