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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

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

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I have been assured by a very knowing American of my acquaintance in London, that a young healthy child well nursed is at a year old a most delicious, nourishing, and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled and I make no doubt that it will equally serve in a fricassee or a ragout.
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Few are qualified to shine in company, but it is in most men's power to be agreeable.
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For though, in nature, depth and height Are equally held infinite: In poetry, the height we know 'Tis only infinite below.
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Imaginary evils soon become real ones by indulging our reflections on them as he who in a melancholy fancy sees something like a face on the wall or the wainscot can, by two or three touches with a lead pencil, make it look visible, and agreeing with what he fancied.
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Do you think I was born in a wood to be afraid of an owl?
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As love without esteem is capricious and volatile esteem without love is languid and cold.
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Men of wit, learning and virtue might strike out every offensive or unbecoming passage from plays.
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My father had a small Estate in Nottinghamshire I was the Third of five Sons.
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Everybody wants to live forever, but nobody wants to grow old.
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A tavern is a place where madness is sold by the bottle.
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No man was ever so completely skilled in the conduct of life, as not to receive new information from age and experience.
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Just get the right syllable in the proper place.
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Good manners is the art of making those people easy with whom we converse. Whoever makes the fewest people uneasy is the best bred in the room.
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Though fear should lend him pinions like the wind, yet swifter fate will seize him from behind.
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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.
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Words are but wind and learning is nothing but words ergo, learning is nothing but wind.
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If the world had but a dozen Arbuthnots in it, I would burn my Travels.
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... the atheists, libertines, despisers of religion ... that is to say all those who usually pass under the name of Free-thinkers.
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She 's no chicken she 's on the wrong side of thirty, if she be a day.
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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.
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