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The first springs of great events, like those of great rivers, are often mean and little.
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
First
Springs
Mean
Rivers
Great
Spring
Like
Events
Often
Littles
Little
Firsts
More quotes by Jonathan Swift
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.
Jonathan Swift
No man of honor, as the word is usually understood, did ever pretend that his honor obliged him to be chaste or temperate, to pay his creditors, to be useful to his country, to do good to mankind, to endeavor to be wise or learned, to regard his word, his promise, or his oath.
Jonathan Swift
There's none so blind as they that won't see.
Jonathan Swift
If a man will observe as he walks the streets, I believe he will find the merriest countenances in mourning coaches.
Jonathan Swift
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
You can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear.
Jonathan Swift
A carpenter is known by his chips.
Jonathan Swift
Some dire misfortune to portend, no enemy can match a friend.
Jonathan Swift
No man was ever so completely skilled in the conduct of life, as not to receive new information from age and experience.
Jonathan Swift
There are few wild beasts more to be dreaded than a talking man having nothing to say.
Jonathan Swift
A ridiculous passion which hath no being but in play-books and romances.
Jonathan Swift
It is not so much the being exempt from faults as the having overcome them that is an advantage to us it being with the follies of the mind as with weeds of a field, which if destroyed and consumed upon the place where they grow, enrich and improve it more than if none had ever sprung there.
Jonathan Swift
Two women seldom grow intimate but at the expense of a third person.
Jonathan Swift
Cruel people are ever cowards in emergency.
Jonathan Swift
My father had a small Estate in Nottinghamshire I was the Third of five Sons.
Jonathan Swift
War: that mad game the world so loves to play.
Jonathan Swift
One enemy can do more hurt than ten friends can do good.
Jonathan Swift
'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
If the world had but a dozen Arbuthnots in it, I would burn my Travels.
Jonathan Swift
Everyone desires long life, not one old age.
Jonathan Swift
