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Blot out, correct, insert, refine, enlarge, diminish, interline. Be mindful, when invention fails. To scratch your head and bite your nails.

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
Bites
Mindful
Correct
Scratch
Invention
Scratches
Failing
Bite
Head
Diminish
Blot
Fails
Refine
Mindfulness
Enlarge
Nails
Insert

More quotes by Jonathan Swift

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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.
Jonathan Swift
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Everybody wants to live forever, but nobody wants to grow old.
Jonathan Swift
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Faith, that's as well said as if I had said it myself.
Jonathan Swift
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No man was ever so completely skilled in the conduct of life, as not to receive new information from age and experience.
Jonathan Swift
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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.
Jonathan Swift
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I wonder what fool it was that first invented kissing.
Jonathan Swift
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You cannot reason a person out of something they were not reasoned into.
Jonathan Swift
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There are few wild beasts more to be dreaded than a talking man having nothing to say.
Jonathan Swift
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Such a man, truly wise, creams off Nature leaving the sour and the dregs for philosophy and reason to lap up.
Jonathan Swift
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God hath intended our passions to prevail over reason.
Jonathan Swift
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It is useless to attempt to reason a man out of a thing he was never reasoned into.
Jonathan Swift
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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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I row after health like a waterman.
Jonathan Swift
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Two women seldom grow intimate but at the expense of a third person.
Jonathan Swift
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For in reason, all government without the consent of the governed is the very definition of slavery.
Jonathan Swift
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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.
Jonathan Swift
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It is an uncontrolled truth, that no man ever made an ill figure who understood his own talents, nor a good one who mistook them.
Jonathan Swift
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Cruel people are ever cowards in emergency.
Jonathan Swift
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If the men of wit and genius would resolve never to complain in their works of critics and detractors, the next age would not know that they ever had any.
Jonathan Swift
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No man will take counsel, but every man will take money. Therefore, money is better than counsel.
Jonathan Swift