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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
Imitate
Defects
Fools
Fool
Betters

More quotes by Jonathan Swift

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Unjustly poets we asperse: Truth shines the brighter clad in verse, And all the fictions they pursue Do but insinuate what is true.
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Blot out, correct, insert, refine, enlarge, diminish, interline. Be mindful, when invention fails. To scratch your head and bite your nails.
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The preaching of divines helps to preserve well-inclined men in the course of virtue, but seldom or ever reclaims the vicious.
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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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Nothing is so hard for those who abound in riches as to conceive how others can be in want.
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Real vision is the ability to see the invisible.
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Men of great parts are often unfortunate in the management of public business, because they are apt to go out of the common road by the quickness of their imagination.
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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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The tucked-up sempstress walks with hasty strides, While streams run down her oil'd umbrella's sides.
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A maxim in law has more weight in the world than an article of faith.
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Lord, Madame, I have fed like a farmer I shall grow as fat as a porpoise.
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So, naturalists observe, a flea Hath smaller fleas that on him prey And these have smaller fleas to bite 'em, And so proceed ad infinitum.
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hoever wishes to win in this game must have patience and money, since the values are so little constant and the rumors so little founded on truth Vision is the art of seeing things invisible.
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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.
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The two noblest of things, which are sweetness and light.
Jonathan Swift
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They say fish should swim thrice * * * first it should swim in the sea (do you mind me?) then it should swim in butter, and at last, sirrah, it should swim in good claret.
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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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Just get the right syllable in the proper place.
Jonathan Swift
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Principally I hate and detest that animal called man although I heartily love John, Peter, Thomas, and so forth.
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It is very unfair in any writer to employ ignorance and malice together, because it gives his answerer double work.
Jonathan Swift