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Possession, they say, is eleven points of the law.

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
Eleven
Points
Possession
Law

More quotes by Jonathan Swift

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Hereditary right should be kept sacred, not from any inalienable right in a particular family, but to avoid the consequences that usually attend the ambition of competitors.
Jonathan Swift
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An atheist has got one point beyond the devil.
Jonathan Swift
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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
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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.
Jonathan Swift
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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.
Jonathan Swift
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Men of wit, learning and virtue might strike out every offensive or unbecoming passage from plays.
Jonathan Swift
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The affectation of some late authors to introduce and multiply cant words is the most ruinous corruption in any language.
Jonathan Swift
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Two friendships in two breasts requires The same aversions and desires.
Jonathan Swift
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When we desire or solicit anything, our minds run wholly on the good side or circumstances of it when it is obtained, our minds run wholly on the bad ones.
Jonathan Swift
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Nothing is so great an example of bad manners as flattery. If you flatter all the company, you please none If you flatter only one or two, you offend the rest.
Jonathan Swift
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Vision is the Art of seeing Things invisible.
Jonathan Swift
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Many a truth is told in jest.
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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.
Jonathan Swift
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He that calls a man ungrateful sums up all the veil that a man can be guilty of.
Jonathan Swift
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If the world had but a dozen Arbuthnots in it, I would burn my Travels.
Jonathan Swift
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Ah, a German and a genius ! A prodigy, admit him !
Jonathan Swift
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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.
Jonathan Swift
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With a whirl of thought oppressed I sink from reverie to rest. An horrid vision seized my head, I saw the graves give up their dead.
Jonathan Swift
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There is nothing in this world constant, but inconstancy.
Jonathan Swift
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Vision is seeing the invisible.
Jonathan Swift