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By candle-light nobody would have taken you for above five-and-twenty.

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
Would
Candle
Twenty
Twenties
Nobody
Taken
Five
Age
Light

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111 company is like a dog, who dirts those most whom he loves best.
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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.
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A Child will make two Dishes at an Entertainment for Friends and when the Family dines alone, the fore or hind Quarter will makea reasonable Dish and seasoned with a little Pepper or Salt, will be very good Boiled on the fourth Day, especially in Winter.
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It is pleasant to observe how free the present age is in laying taxes on the next. Future ages shall talk of this they shall be famous to all posterity whereas their time and thoughts will be taken up about present things, as ours are now.
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Triumphant Tories, and desponding Whigs, Forget their feuds, and join to save their wigs.
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There is no vice or folly that requires so much nicety and skill to manage as vanity nor any which by ill management makes so contemptible a figure.
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Interest is the spur of the people, but glory that of great souls. Invention is the talent of youth, and judgment of age.
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One enemy can do more hurt than ten friends can do good.
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There never appear more than five or six men of genius in an age, but if they were united the world could not stand before them.
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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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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.
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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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Punning is a talent which no man affects to despise but he that is without it.
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Fine words! I wonder where you stole them.
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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.
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My father had a small Estate in Nottinghamshire I was the Third of five Sons.
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Ah, a German and a genius ! A prodigy, admit him !
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Do you think I was born in a wood to be afraid of an owl?
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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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