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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
Edges
Cutting
Lost
Never
Razors
Wits
Employed
Wit
Edge

More quotes by Jonathan Swift

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In like manner, the disbelief of a Divine Providence renders a man uncapable of holding any public station for, since kings avow themselves to be the deputies of Providence.
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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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The two maxims of any great man at court are, always to keep his countenance, and never to keep his word.
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There are few, very few, that will own themselves in a mistake.
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Surely mortal man is a broomstick!
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So, naturalists observe, a flea Hath smaller fleas that on him prey And these have smaller fleas to bite 'em, And so proceed ad infinitum.
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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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Many a truth is told in jest.
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Flattery is the worst and falsest way of showing our esteem.
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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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It may pass for a maxim in State, that the administration cannot be placed in too few hands, nor the legislature in too many.
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Pedantry is properly the over-rating of any kind of knowledge we pretend to.
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Everybody wants to live forever, but nobody wants to grow old.
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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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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.
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Promises and pie-crust are made to be broken.
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I shall be like that tree-I shall die at the top.
Jonathan Swift
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Story-telling is subject to two unavoidable defects,--frequent repetition and being soon exhausted so that, whoever values this gift in himself, has need of a good memory, and ought frequently to shift his company.
Jonathan Swift
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Ingratitude is amongst them a capital crime, as we read it to have been in some other countries: for they reason thus that whoever makes ill-returns to his benefactor, must needs be a common enemy to the rest of the mankind, from where he has received no obligations and therefore such man is not fit to live.
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Although men are accused of not knowing their own weakness, yet perhaps few know their own strength. It is in men as in soils, where sometimes there is a vein of gold which the owner knows not of.
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