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Fools are apt to imitate only the defects of their betters.

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
Defects
Fools
Fool
Betters
Imitate

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The tiny Lilliputians surmise that Gulliver's watch may be his god, because it is that which, he admits, he seldom does anything without consulting.
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Small causes are sufficient to make a man uneasy, when great ones are not in the way: for want of a block he will stumble at a straw.
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If a man will observe as he walks the streets, I believe he will find the merriest countenances in mourning coaches.
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A college joke to cure the dumps.
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Vision is the Art of seeing Things invisible.
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Love why do we one passion call, When 'tis a compound of them all? Where hot and cold, where sharp and sweet, In all their equipages meet Where pleasures mix'd with pains appear, Sorrow with joy, and hope with fear.
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You can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear.
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Reason is a very light rider, and easily shook off.
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If the world had but a dozen Arbuthnots in it, I would burn my Travels.
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A lie is an excuse guarded
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Pride, ill nature, and want of sense, are the three great sources of ill manners.
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They say fingers were made before forks, and hands before knives.
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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.
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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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It is an uncontrolled truth, that no man ever made an ill figure who understood his own talents, nor a good one who mistook them.
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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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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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Though fear should lend him pinions like the wind, yet swifter fate will seize him from behind.
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Do you think I was born in a wood to be afraid of an owl?
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Just get the right syllable in the proper place.
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