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

More quotes by Jonathan Swift

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And, is not Virtue in Mankind The Nutriment that feeds the Mind?
Jonathan Swift
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Let a man be ne'er so wise, he may be caught with sober lies.
Jonathan Swift
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Men who possess all the advantages of life are in a state where there are many accidents to disorder and discompose, but few to please them.
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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I shall be like that tree-I shall die at the top.
Jonathan Swift
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All panegyrics are mingled with an infusion of poppy.
Jonathan Swift
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Bread is the staff of life.
Jonathan Swift
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Whoever makes the fewest persons uneasy, is the best bred man in company.
Jonathan Swift
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A tavern is a place where madness is sold by the bottle.
Jonathan Swift
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I hate nobody: I am in charity with the world.
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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Pride, ill nature, and want of sense, are the three great sources of ill manners.
Jonathan Swift
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Books, like men their authors, have no more than one wayofcoming intothe world, but there areten thousand to go out of it, and return no more.
Jonathan Swift
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Come hither, all ye empty things, Ye bubbles rais'd by breath of Kings Who float upon the tide of state, Come hither, and behold your fate. Let pride be taught by this rebuke, How very mean a thing's a Duke From all his ill-got honours flung, Turn'd to that dirt from whence he sprung.
Jonathan Swift
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The more careless, the more modish.
Jonathan Swift
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All Pretences of foretelling by Astrology, are Deceits for this manifest Reason, because the Wise and Learned, who can only judge whether there be any Truth in this Science, do all unanimously agree to laugh at and despise it and none but the poor ignorant Vulgar give it any Credit.
Jonathan Swift
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She 's no chicken she 's on the wrong side of thirty, if she be a day.
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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Ever eating, never cloying, All-devouring, all-destroying Never finding full repast, Till I eat the world at last.
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