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

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A Child will make two Dishes at an Entertainment for Friends and when the Family dines alone, the fore or hind Quarter will makea reasonable Dish and seasoned with a little Pepper or Salt, will be very good Boiled on the fourth Day, especially in Winter.
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I never wonder to see men wicked, but I often wonder to see them not ashamed.
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I shall be like that tree-I shall die at the top.
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A traveler's chief aim should be to make men wiser and better, and to improve their minds by the bad-as well as good example of what they deliver concerning foreign places.
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A little grain of the romance is no ill ingredient to preserve and exalt the dignity of human nature, without which it is apt to degenerate into everything that is sordid, vicious and low.
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Men of wit, learning and virtue might strike out every offensive or unbecoming passage from plays.
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Kitchen Physic is the best Physic.
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Tis nothing when you are used to it.
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Promises and pie-crust are made to be broken.
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For, if we take an examination of what is generally understood by happiness, as it has respect either to the understanding or the senses, we shall find all its properties and adjuncts will herd under this short definition: that it is a perpetual possession of being well deceived.
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What poet would not grieve to see His brother write as well as he? But rather than they should excel, He'd wish his rivals all in Hell.
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A wise man will find us to be rogues by our faces.
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When a true genius appears, you can know him by this sign: that all the dunces are in a confederacy against him.
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That incessant envy wherewith the common rate of mankind pursues all superior natures to their own.
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He was a bold man that first ate an oyster.
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Religion seems to have grown an infant with age, and requires miracles to nurse it, as it had in its infancy.
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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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There is nothing constant in this world but inconsistency.
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