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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
Often
Littles
Little
Firsts
First
Springs
Mean
Rivers
Great
Spring
Like
Events

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Words are but wind and learning is nothing but words ergo, learning is nothing but wind.
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Men of wit, learning and virtue might strike out every offensive or unbecoming passage from plays.
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In all distresses of our friends We first consult our private ends While Nature, kindly bent to ease us, Points out some circumstance to please us.
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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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Coffee makes us severe, and grave and philosophical.
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Small causes are sufficient to make a man uneasy, when great ones are not in the way: for want of a block he will stumble at a straw.
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Whoe'er excels in what we prize, Appears a hero in our eyes Each girl, when pleased with what is taught, Will have the teacher in her thought. . . . . A blockhead with melodious voice, In boarding-schools may have his choice.
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It often happens that, if a lie be believed only for an hour, it has done its work, and there is no further occasion for it.
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We have enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love one another.
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Liberty of conscience is nowadays only understood to be the liberty of believing what men please, but also of endeavoring to propagate that belief as much as they can.
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No preacher is listened to but time, which gives us the same train and turn of thought that elder people have in vain tried to put into our heads before.
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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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Many a truth is told in jest.
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Possession, they say, is eleven points of the law.
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If the world had but a dozen Arbuthnots in it, I would burn my Travels.
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The two noblest of things, which are sweetness and light.
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Hereditary right should be kept sacred, not from any inalienable right in a particular family, but to avoid the consequences that usually attend the ambition of competitors.
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What religion is he of? Why, he is an Anythingarian.
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I'm up and down and round about, Yet all the world can't find me out Though hundreds have employed their leisure, They never yet could find my measure.
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Politics, as the word is commonly understood, are nothing but corruptions.
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