Quote

It is not so much the being exempt from faults as the having overcome them that is an advantage to us it being with the follies of the mind as with weeds of a field, which if destroyed and consumed upon the place where they grow, enrich and improve it more than if none had ever sprung there.

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
Grow
Improve
Follies
Grows
Overcoming
Sprung
Upon
Destroyed
Enrich
Place
Faults
Weeds
Ever
Field
Consumed
Much
None
Weed
Mind
Advantage
Folly
Fields
Overcome
Exempt

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With a whirl of thought oppressed I sink from reverie to rest. An horrid vision seized my head, I saw the graves give up their dead.
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A footman may swear but he cannot swear like a lord. He can swear as often: but can he swear with equal delicacy, propriety, and judgment?
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I am convinced that if the virtuosi could once find out a world in the moon, with a passage to it, our women would wear nothing but what directly came from thence.
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I never knew any man cured of inattention.
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Coffee makes us severe, and grave and philosophical.
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In oratory the greatest art is to hide art.
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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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Although men are accused of not knowing their own weakness, yet perhaps few know their own strength. It is in men as in soils, where sometimes there is a vein of gold which the owner knows not of.
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I have known some men possessed of good qualities which were very serviceable to others, but useless to themselves like a sun-dial on the front of a house, to inform the neighbours and passengers, but not the owner within.
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Words are but wind and learning is nothing but words ergo, learning is nothing but wind.
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There are few, very few, that will own themselves in a mistake.
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Last week I saw a woman flayed, and you will hardly believe, how much it altered her person for the worse.
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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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So geographers, in Africa maps, With savage pictures fill their gaps, And o'er uninhabitable downs Place elephants for want of towns
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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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Once kick the world, and the world and you will live together at a reasonably good understanding.
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In church your grandsire cut his throat to do the job too long he tarried: he should have had my hearty vote to cut his throat before he married.
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Flattery is the worst and falsest way of showing our esteem.
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It is with wits as with razors, which are never so apt to cut those they are employed on as when they have lost their edge.
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For the rest, whatever we have got has been by infinite labor, and search, and ranging through every corner of nature the difference is that instead of dirt and poison, we have rather chosen to fill our hives with honey and wax, thus furnishing mankind with the two noblest of things, which are sweetness and light.
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