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I forget whether advice be among the lost things which Ariosto says are to be found in the moon: that and time ought to have been there.

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
Ought
Says
Forget
Whether
Lost
Found
Moon
Things
Advice
Time
Among

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Every man desires to live long, but no man wishes to be old.
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Books, the children of the brain.
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I would rather be a freeman among slaves than a slave among freemen.
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Everyone desires long life, not one old age.
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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.
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He was a fiddler, and consequently a rogue.
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Arbitrary power is but the first natural step from anarchy, or the savage life.
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For to enter the palace of learning at the great gate requires an expense of time and forms, therefore men of much haste and little ceremony are content to get in by the back-door
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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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Under this window in stormy weather I marry this man and woman together Let none but Him who rules the thunder Put this man and woman asunder.
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There are but three ways for a man to revenge himself of the censure of the world,--to despise it, to return the like, or to endeavor to live so as to avoid it the first of these is usually pretended, the last is almost impossible, the universal practice is for the second.
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What vexes me most is, that my female friends, who could bear me very well a dozen years ago, have now forsaken me, although I am not so old in proportion to them as I formerly was: which I can prove by arithmetic, for then I was double their age, which now I am not. Letter to Alexander Pope. 7 Feb. 1736.
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I row after health like a waterman.
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A chuck under the chin is worth two kisses.
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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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The preaching of divines helps to preserve well-inclined men in the course of virtue, but seldom or ever reclaims the vicious.
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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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The lack of belief is a defect that ought to be concealed when it cannot be overcome.
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I won't quarrel with my bread and butter.
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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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