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A true critic, in the perusal of a book, is like a dog at a feast, whose thoughts and stomach are wholly set upon what the guests fling away, and consequently is apt to snarl most when there are the fewest bones.

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
Like
Critics
Fling
Dog
Feast
Whose
Consequently
Thoughts
Critic
Upon
Wholly
Away
Guests
Perusal
True
Stomach
Snarl
Book
Bones
Fewest

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Every day is an opportunity to make a new happy ending. May you live all the days of your life.
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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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Though fear should lend him pinions like the wind, yet swifter fate will seize him from behind.
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The example alone of a vicious prince will corrupt an age but that of a good one will not reform it.
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He that calls a man ungrateful sums up all the veil that a man can be guilty of.
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When we desire or solicit anything, our minds run wholly on the good side or circumstances of it when it is obtained, our minds run wholly on the bad ones.
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One principal object of good-breeding is to suit our behaviour to the three several degrees of men, our superiors, our equals, and those below us.
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It is a maxim, that those, to whom everybody allows the second place, have an undoubted title to the first.
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The system of morality to be gathered from the ancient sages falls very short of that delivered in the gospel.
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Possession, they say, is eleven points of the law.
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I never saw, heard, nor read, that the clergy were beloved in any nation where Christianity was the religion of the country. Nothing can render them popular, but some degree of persecution.
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Men of wit, learning and virtue might strike out every offensive or unbecoming passage from plays.
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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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Bread is the staff of life.
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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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Faith, that's as well said as if I had said it myself.
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I am of the level with common Astrologers who, with an old paltry cant, and a few pot-hooks for planets to amuse the vulgar, have too long been suffered to abuse the world.
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It is very unfair in any writer to employ ignorance and malice together, because it gives his answerer double work.
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I cannot imagine why we should be at the expense to furnish wit for succeeding ages, when the former have made no sort of provision for ours.
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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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