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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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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
Sense
Three
Nature
Great
Sources
Ill
Manners
Pride
Source

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Whoever makes the fewest persons uneasy, is the best bred man in company.
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Where I am not understood, it shall be concluded that something very useful and profound is couched underneath.
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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.
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You must take the will for the deed.
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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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O Grub Street! how do I bemoan thee, whose graceless children scorn to own thee! . Yet thou hast greater cause to be ashamed of them, than they of thee.
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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.
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The axe of intemperance has lopped off his green boughs and left him a withered trunk.
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Had Windham possessed discretion in debate, or Sheridan in conduct, they might have ruled their age.
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Promises and pie-crust are made to be broken.
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This wine should be eaten, it is too good to be drunk.
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Simplicity, without which no human performance can arrive at perfection.
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Triumphant Tories, and desponding Whigs, Forget their feuds, and join to save their wigs.
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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.
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No preacher is listened to but time, which gives us the same train and turn of thought that elder people have in vain tried to put into our heads before.
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Religion supposed Heaven and Hell, the word of God, and sacraments, and twenty other circumstances which, taken seriously, are a wonderful check to wit and humour.
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Hail fellow, well met.
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Faith, that's as well said as if I had said it myself.
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Old men and comets have been reverenced for the same reason: their long beards, and pretences to foretell events.
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The best Maxim I know in this life is, to drink your Coffee when you can, and when you cannot, to be easy without it. While you continue to be splenetic, count upon it I will always preach. Thus much I sympathize with you that I am not cheerful enough to write, for I believe Coffee once a week is necessary to that.
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