Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Age
Complain
Next
Wit
Ever
Resolve
Never
Complaining
Would
Critics
Men
Criticism
Works
Genius
Detractors

More quotes by Jonathan Swift

Image
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
Image
The first springs of great events, like those of great rivers, are often mean and little.
Jonathan Swift
Image
Men of great parts are often unfortunate in the management of public business, because they are apt to go out of the common road by the quickness of their imagination.
Jonathan Swift
Image
Simplicity, without which no human performance can arrive at perfection.
Jonathan Swift
Image
A maxim in law has more weight in the world than an article of faith.
Jonathan Swift
Image
There's none so blind as they that won't see.
Jonathan Swift
Image
A footman may swear but he cannot swear like a lord. He can swear as often: but can he swear with equal delicacy, propriety, and judgment?
Jonathan Swift
Image
One principal object of good-breeding is to suit our behaviour to the three several degrees of men, our superiors, our equals, and those below us.
Jonathan Swift
Image
The proper words in the proper places are the true definition of style.
Jonathan Swift
Image
Under the rose, since here are none but friends, To own the truth we have some private ends.
Jonathan Swift
Image
Under this window in stormy weather I marry this man and woman together Let none but Him who rules the thunder Put this man and woman asunder.
Jonathan Swift
Image
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
Image
Faith, that's as well said as if I had said it myself.
Jonathan Swift
Image
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
Image
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
Image
What vexes me most is, that my female friends, who could bear me very well a dozen years ago, have now forsaken me, although I am not so old in proportion to them as I formerly was: which I can prove by arithmetic, for then I was double their age, which now I am not. Letter to Alexander Pope. 7 Feb. 1736.
Jonathan Swift
Image
A fig for your bill of fare show me your bill of company.
Jonathan Swift
Image
Although men are accused of not knowing their own weakness, yet perhaps few know their own strength. It is in men as in soils, where sometimes there is a vein of gold which the owner knows not of.
Jonathan Swift
Image
Although the devil be the father of lies, he seems, like other great inventors, to have lost much of his reputation by the continual improvements that have been made upon him.
Jonathan Swift
Image
Pride, ill nature, and want of sense are the three great sources of ill manners without some one of these defects, no man will behave himself ill for want of experience, or what, in the language of fools, is called knowing the world.
Jonathan Swift