Quote

Imaginary evils soon become real ones by indulging our reflections on them as he who in a melancholy fancy sees something like a face on the wall or the wainscot can, by two or three touches with a lead pencil, make it look visible, and agreeing with what he fancied.

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
Looks
Ones
Imaginary
Indulging
Real
Face
Fancy
Agreeing
Something
Faces
Visible
Reflections
Make
Evil
Sees
Pencil
Like
Three
Reflection
Pencils
Two
Soon
Touches
Become
Lead
Evils
Look
Wall
Melancholy
Fancied

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Flattery is the worst and falsest way of showing our esteem.
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A ridiculous passion which hath no being but in play-books and romances.
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Men of wit, learning and virtue might strike out every offensive or unbecoming passage from plays.
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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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It is likewise to be observed that this society hath a peculiar chant and jargon of their own, that no other mortal can understand, and wherein all their laws are written, which they take special care to multiply.
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No man was ever so completely skilled in the conduct of life, as not to receive new information from age and experience.
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Nothing is so great an example of bad manners as flattery. If you flatter all the company, you please none If you flatter only one or two, you offend the rest.
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The affectation of some late authors to introduce and multiply cant words is the most ruinous corruption in any language.
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Polite Conversation Why, everyone one as they like as the good woman said when she kissed her cow.
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If a lump of soot falls into the soup and you cannot conveniently get it out, stir it well in and it will give the soup a French taste.
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Where I am not understood, it shall be concluded that something very useful and profound is couched underneath.
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Interest is the spur of the people, but glory that of great souls. Invention is the talent of youth, and judgment of age.
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My nose itched, and I knew I should drink wine or kiss a fool.
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Ingratitude is amongst them a capital crime, as we read it to have been in some other countries: for they reason thus that whoever makes ill-returns to his benefactor, must needs be a common enemy to the rest of the mankind, from where he has received no obligations and therefore such man is not fit to live.
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Daphne knows, with equal ease, How to vex and how to please But the folly of her sex Makes her sole delight to vex.
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Triumphant Tories, and desponding Whigs, Forget their feuds, and join to save their wigs.
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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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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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This wine should be eaten, it is too good to be drunk.
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If Heaven had looked upon riches to be a valuable thing, it would not have given them to such a scoundrel.
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