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

More quotes by Jonathan Swift

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I wonder what fool it was that first invented kissing.
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Vision is seeing the invisible.
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Everybody wants to live forever, but nobody wants to grow old.
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I row after health like a waterman.
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The example alone of a vicious prince will corrupt an age but that of a good one will not reform it.
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Every day is an opportunity to make a new happy ending. May you live all the days of your life.
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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.
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Possession, they say, is eleven points of the law.
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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.
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'T is an old maxim in the schools, That flattery 's the food of fools Yet now and then your men of wit Will condescend to take a bit.
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I would rather be a freeman among slaves than a slave among freemen.
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The stoical scheme of supplying our wants by lopping off our desires, is like cutting off our feet when we want shoes.
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I always love to begin a journey on Sundays, because I shall have the prayers of the church to preserve all that travel by land, or water.
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It often happens that, if a lie be believed only for an hour, it has done its work, and there is no further occasion for it.
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If a lump of soot falls into the soup and you cannot conveniently get it out, stir it well in and it will give the soup a French taste.
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I am convinced that if the virtuosi could once find out a world in the moon, with a passage to it, our women would wear nothing but what directly came from thence.
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Very few men, properly speaking, live at present, but are providing to live another time.
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Under the rose, since here are none but friends, To own the truth we have some private ends.
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For poetry, he's past his prime, He takes an hour to find a rhyme His fire is out, his wit decayed, His fancy sunk, his muse a jade. I'd have him throw away his pen, But there's no talking to some men.
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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.
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