Quote

How often do we contradict the right rules of reason in the whole course of our lives! Reason itself is true and just, but the reason of every particular man is weak and wavering, perpetually swayed and turned by his interests, his passions, and his vices.

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
Whole
Courses
Perpetually
Right
Course
Passions
Every
Passion
Vices
Men
Interest
Interests
Lives
Turned
Often
Rules
Swayed
True
Weak
Wavering
Reason
Particular
Contradict

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Though fear should lend him pinions like the wind, yet swifter fate will seize him from behind.
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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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It is impossible that anything so natural, so necessary, and so universal as death, should ever have been designed by providence as an evil to mankind.
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Poor nations are hungry, and rich nations are proud and pride and hunger will ever be at variance.
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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.
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An atheist has got one point beyond the devil.
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Then, rising with Aurora's light, The Muse invoked, sit down to write Blot out, correct, insert, refine, Enlarge, diminish, interline.
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This made me reflect, how vain an attempt it is for a man to endeavor to do himself honor among those who are out of all degree of equality or comparison with him.
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If a man would register all his opinions upon love, politics, religion, learning etc., beginning from his youth, and so go to old age, what a bundle of inconsistencies and contradictions would appear at last.
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Argument, as usually managed, is the worst sort of conversation, as it is generally in books the worst sort of reading.
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Under the rose, since here are none but friends, To own the truth we have some private ends.
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Nothing is so hard for those who abound in riches as to conceive how others can be in want.
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I wonder what fool it was that first invented kissing.
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Whence proceeds this weight we lay On what detracting people say? Their utmost malice cannot make Your head, or tooth, or finger ache Nor spoil your shapes, distort your face, Or put one feature out of place.
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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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What we call the Irish Brogue is no sooner discovered, than it makes the deliverer, in the last degree, ridiculous and despised and, from such a mouth, an Englishman expects nothing but bulls, blunders, and follies.
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Modesty may make a fool seem a man of sense.
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She 's no chicken she 's on the wrong side of thirty, if she be a day.
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We are so fond on one another because our ailments are the same.
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