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Few are qualified to shine in company, but it is in most men's power to be agreeable.

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
Qualified
Shine
Shining
Company
Power
Men
Agreeable

More quotes by Jonathan Swift

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It is very unfair in any writer to employ ignorance and malice together, because it gives his answerer double work.
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That the universe was formed by a fortuitous concourse of atoms, I will no more believe than that the accidental jumbling of the alphabet would fall into a most ingenious treatise of philosophy.
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Coffee makes us severe, and grave and philosophical.
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Whoe'er excels in what we prize, Appears a hero in our eyes Each girl, when pleased with what is taught, Will have the teacher in her thought. . . . . A blockhead with melodious voice, In boarding-schools may have his choice.
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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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Words are but wind and learning is nothing but words ergo, learning is nothing but wind.
Jonathan Swift
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A lie does not consist in the indirect position of words, but in the desire and intention, by false speaking, to deceive and injure your neighbour.
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He was a bold man that first ate an oyster.
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One enemy can do more hurt than ten friends can do good.
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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.
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Fond of those hives where folly reigns, And cards and scandal are the chains, Where the pert virgin slights a name, And scorns to redden into shame.
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Just get the right syllable in the proper place.
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You should never be ashamed to admit you have been wrong. It only proves you are wiser today than yesterday
Jonathan Swift
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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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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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Politics, as the word is commonly understood, are nothing but corruptions.
Jonathan Swift
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A wise man will find us to be rogues by our faces.
Jonathan Swift
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Pray steal me not, I'm Mrs. Dingley's, Whose heart in this four-footed thing lies.
Jonathan Swift
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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.
Jonathan Swift
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If a man will observe as he walks the streets, I believe he will find the merriest countenances in mourning coaches.
Jonathan Swift