Quote

The axe of intemperance has lopped off his green boughs and left him a withered trunk.

Jonathan Swift

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Trunk
Withered
Trunks
Drunkenness
Green
Left
Lopped
Boughs
Intemperance

More quotes by Jonathan Swift

Image
That incessant envy wherewith the common rate of mankind pursues all superior natures to their own.
Jonathan Swift
Image
A jargon form'd from the lost language, wit, Confounded in that Babel of the pit Form'd by diseased conceptions, weak and wild, Sick lust of souls, and an abortive child Born between whores and fops, by lewd compacts, Before the play, or else between the acts Nor wonder, if from such polluted minds Should spring such short and transitory kinds.
Jonathan Swift
Image
This wine should be eaten, it is too good to be drunk.
Jonathan Swift
Image
Fools are apt to imitate only the defects of their betters.
Jonathan Swift
Image
There's none so blind as they that won't see.
Jonathan Swift
Image
You must take the will for the deed.
Jonathan Swift
Image
Pray steal me not, I'm Mrs. Dingley's, Whose heart in this four-footed thing lies.
Jonathan Swift
Image
111 company is like a dog, who dirts those most whom he loves best.
Jonathan Swift
Image
He was a fiddler, and consequently a rogue.
Jonathan Swift
Image
Such a man, truly wise, creams off Nature leaving the sour and the dregs for philosophy and reason to lap up.
Jonathan Swift
Image
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.
Jonathan Swift
Image
Perpetual aiming at wit is a very bad part of conversation. It is done to support a character: it generally fails it is a sort of insult on the company, and a restraint upon the speaker.
Jonathan Swift
Image
I'm as old as my tongue and a little older than my teeth.
Jonathan Swift
Image
There is no vice or folly that requires so much nicety and skill to manage as vanity nor any which by ill management makes so contemptible a figure.
Jonathan Swift
Image
My nose itched, and I knew I should drink wine or kiss a fool.
Jonathan Swift
Image
We have enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love one another.
Jonathan Swift
Image
A lie is an excuse guarded
Jonathan Swift
Image
I cannot but conclude that the Bulk of your Natives, to be the most pernicious Race of little odious Vermin that Nature ever suffered to crawl upon the Surface of the Earth.
Jonathan Swift
Image
Books, like men their authors, have no more than one wayofcoming intothe world, but there areten thousand to go out of it, and return no more.
Jonathan Swift
Image
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.
Jonathan Swift