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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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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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Everybody wants to live forever, but nobody wants to grow old.
Jonathan Swift
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When men grow virtuous in their old age, they only make a sacrifice to God of the devil's leavings.
Jonathan Swift
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I never wonder to see men wicked, but I often wonder to see them not ashamed.
Jonathan Swift
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How often do we contradict the right rules of reason in the whole course of our lives! Reason itself is true and just, but the reason of every particular man is weak and wavering, perpetually swayed and turned by his interests, his passions, and his vices.
Jonathan Swift
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If a man would register all his opinions upon love, politics, religion, learning etc., beginning from his youth, and so go to old age, what a bundle of inconsistencies and contradictions would appear at last.
Jonathan Swift
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We are so fond on one another because our ailments are the same.
Jonathan Swift
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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.
Jonathan Swift
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You should never be ashamed to admit you have been wrong. It only proves you are wiser today than yesterday
Jonathan Swift
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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.
Jonathan Swift
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There is no vice or folly that requires so much nicety and skill to manage as vanity nor any which by ill management makes so contemptible a figure.
Jonathan Swift
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If a lump of soot falls into the soup and you cannot conveniently get it out, stir it well in and it will give the soup a French taste.
Jonathan Swift
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I'm as old as my tongue and a little older than my teeth.
Jonathan Swift
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Words are but wind and learning is nothing but words ergo, learning is nothing but wind.
Jonathan Swift
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A maxim in law has more weight in the world than an article of faith.
Jonathan Swift
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Pedantry is properly the over-rating of any kind of knowledge we pretend to.
Jonathan Swift
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I remember it was with extreme difficulty that I could bring my master to understand the meaning of the word opinion, or how a point could be disputable because reason taught us to affirm or deny only where we are certain and beyond our knowledge we cannot do either.
Jonathan Swift
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Interest is the spur of the people, but glory that of great souls. Invention is the talent of youth, and judgment of age.
Jonathan Swift
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Careful observers may foretell the hour (By sure prognostics) when to dread a show'r. While rain depends, the pensive cat gives o'er Her frolics, and pursues her tail no more.
Jonathan Swift
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The tiny Lilliputians surmise that Gulliver's watch may be his god, because it is that which, he admits, he seldom does anything without consulting.
Jonathan Swift