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It is with wits as with razors, which are never so apt to cut those they are employed on as when they have lost their edge.

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
Wit
Edge
Edges
Cutting
Lost
Never
Razors
Wits
Employed

More quotes by Jonathan Swift

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The best Maxim I know in this life is, to drink your Coffee when you can, and when you cannot, to be easy without it. While you continue to be splenetic, count upon it I will always preach. Thus much I sympathize with you that I am not cheerful enough to write, for I believe Coffee once a week is necessary to that.
Jonathan Swift
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Vanity is a mark of humility rather than of pride.
Jonathan Swift
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If you were not reasoned into your beliefs, you cannot be reasoned out of them.
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We are so fond on one another because our ailments are the same.
Jonathan Swift
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For though, in nature, depth and height Are equally held infinite: In poetry, the height we know 'Tis only infinite below.
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Though Diogenes lived in a tub, there might be, for aught I know, as much pride under his rags, as in the fine-spun garments of the divine Plato.
Jonathan Swift
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Love why do we one passion call, When 'tis a compound of them all? Where hot and cold, where sharp and sweet, In all their equipages meet Where pleasures mix'd with pains appear, Sorrow with joy, and hope with fear.
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It may pass for a maxim in State, that the administration cannot be placed in too few hands, nor the legislature in too many.
Jonathan Swift
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The first springs of great events, like those of great rivers, are often mean and little.
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If Heaven had looked upon riches to be a valuable thing, it would not have given them to such a scoundrel.
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Do you think I was born in a wood to be afraid of an owl?
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Vision is the Art of seeing Things invisible.
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Many a truth is told in jest.
Jonathan Swift
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She 's no chicken she 's on the wrong side of thirty, if she be a day.
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A true critic, in the perusal of a book, is like a dog at a feast, whose thoughts and stomach are wholly set upon what the guests fling away, and consequently is apt to snarl most when there are the fewest bones.
Jonathan Swift
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The more careless, the more modish.
Jonathan Swift
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Philosophy! the lumber of the schools.
Jonathan Swift
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Then, rising with Aurora's light, The Muse invoked, sit down to write Blot out, correct, insert, refine, Enlarge, diminish, interline.
Jonathan Swift
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Poor nations are hungry, and rich nations are proud and pride and hunger will ever be at variance.
Jonathan Swift
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When men grow virtuous in their old age, they only make a sacrifice to God of the devil's leavings.
Jonathan Swift