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Many a truth is told in jest.

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
Jest
Told
Wisdom
Truth
Many

More quotes by Jonathan Swift

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In church your grandsire cut his throat to do the job too long he tarried: he should have had my hearty vote to cut his throat before he married.
Jonathan Swift
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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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No man of honor, as the word is usually understood, did ever pretend that his honor obliged him to be chaste or temperate, to pay his creditors, to be useful to his country, to do good to mankind, to endeavor to be wise or learned, to regard his word, his promise, or his oath.
Jonathan Swift
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Simplicity, without which no human performance can arrive at perfection.
Jonathan Swift
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The axe of intemperance has lopped off his green boughs and left him a withered trunk.
Jonathan Swift
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In like manner, the disbelief of a Divine Providence renders a man uncapable of holding any public station for, since kings avow themselves to be the deputies of Providence.
Jonathan Swift
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They say fingers were made before forks, and hands before knives.
Jonathan Swift
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For to enter the palace of learning at the great gate requires an expense of time and forms, therefore men of much haste and little ceremony are content to get in by the back-door
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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Tis nothing when you are used to it.
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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I'll give you leave to call me anything, if you don't call me spade.
Jonathan Swift
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I cannot but conclude that the Bulk of your Natives, to be the most pernicious Race of little odious Vermin that Nature ever suffered to crawl upon the Surface of the Earth.
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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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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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.
Jonathan Swift
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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.
Jonathan Swift
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Flattery is the worst and falsest way of showing our esteem.
Jonathan Swift
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I am of the level with common Astrologers who, with an old paltry cant, and a few pot-hooks for planets to amuse the vulgar, have too long been suffered to abuse the world.
Jonathan Swift
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I hate nobody: I am in charity with the world.
Jonathan Swift