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Religion supposed Heaven and Hell, the word of God, and sacraments, and twenty other circumstances which, taken seriously, are a wonderful check to wit and humour.

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
Heaven
Seriously
Religion
Supposed
Sacraments
Atheism
Humour
Circumstances
Wit
Hell
Check
Wonderful
Checks
Taken
Twenty
Word
Twenties

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By candle-light nobody would have taken you for above five-and-twenty.
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She wears her clothes as if they were thrown on with a pitchfork.
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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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Surely mortal man is a broomstick!
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You must take the will for the deed.
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Possession, they say, is eleven points of the law.
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Come hither, all ye empty things, Ye bubbles rais'd by breath of Kings Who float upon the tide of state, Come hither, and behold your fate. Let pride be taught by this rebuke, How very mean a thing's a Duke From all his ill-got honours flung, Turn'd to that dirt from whence he sprung.
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All panegyrics are mingled with an infusion of poppy.
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It is a maxim, that those, to whom everybody allows the second place, have an undoubted title to the first.
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In men desire begets love, and in women love begets desire.
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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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Pedantry is properly the over-rating of any kind of knowledge we pretend to.
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I row after health like a waterman.
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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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Good manners is the art of making those people easy with whom we converse. Whoever makes the fewest people uneasy is the best bred in the room.
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Simplicity, without which no human performance can arrive at perfection.
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What they do in heaven we are ignorant of what they do not do we are told expressly.
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Modesty may make a fool seem a man of sense.
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Old men and comets have been reverenced for the same reason: their long beards, and pretences to foretell events.
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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.
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