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They say fish should swim thrice * * * first it should swim in the sea (do you mind me?) then it should swim in butter, and at last, sirrah, it should swim in good claret.
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
Last
Swim
Firsts
Fish
First
Fishes
Mind
Boat
Claret
Good
Rivers
Thrice
Sea
Butter
Food
Lakes
Lasts
Fishing
More quotes by Jonathan Swift
Punning is a talent which no man affects to despise but he that is without it.
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Just get the right syllable in the proper place.
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Men of great parts are often unfortunate in the management of public business, because they are apt to go out of the common road by the quickness of their imagination.
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Men of wit, learning and virtue might strike out every offensive or unbecoming passage from plays.
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Simplicity, without which no human performance can arrive at perfection.
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The tucked-up sempstress walks with hasty strides, While streams run down her oil'd umbrella's sides.
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When men grow virtuous in their old age, they only make a sacrifice to God of the devil's leavings.
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So geographers, in Africa maps, With savage pictures fill their gaps, And o'er uninhabitable downs Place elephants for want of towns
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A college joke to cure the dumps.
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My horses understand me tolerably well I converse with them at least four hours every day. They are strangers to bridle or saddle they live in great amity with me, and friendship of each other.
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You must take the will for the deed.
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It is impossible that anything so natural, so necessary, and so universal as death, should ever have been designed by providence as an evil to mankind.
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Faith, that's as well said as if I had said it myself.
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The tiny Lilliputians surmise that Gulliver's watch may be his god, because it is that which, he admits, he seldom does anything without consulting.
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Careful observers may foretell the hour (By sure prognostics) when to dread a show'r. While rain depends, the pensive cat gives o'er Her frolics, and pursues her tail no more.
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It is an uncontrolled truth, that no man ever made an ill figure who understood his own talents, nor a good one who mistook them.
Jonathan Swift
When a true genius appears, you can know him by this sign: that all the dunces are in a confederacy against him.
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There are few, very few, that will own themselves in a mistake.
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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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All Pretences of foretelling by Astrology, are Deceits for this manifest Reason, because the Wise and Learned, who can only judge whether there be any Truth in this Science, do all unanimously agree to laugh at and despise it and none but the poor ignorant Vulgar give it any Credit.
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