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Some dire misfortune to portend, no enemy can match a friend.

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
Match
Friend
Enemy
Friends
Dire
Misfortune
Misfortunes

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Two friendships in two breasts requires The same aversions and desires.
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I never wonder to see men wicked, but I often wonder to see them not ashamed.
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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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Everybody wants to live forever, but nobody wants to grow old.
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You must take the will for the deed.
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What vexes me most is, that my female friends, who could bear me very well a dozen years ago, have now forsaken me, although I am not so old in proportion to them as I formerly was: which I can prove by arithmetic, for then I was double their age, which now I am not. Letter to Alexander Pope. 7 Feb. 1736.
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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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How often do we contradict the right rules of reason in the whole course of our lives! Reason itself is true and just, but the reason of every particular man is weak and wavering, perpetually swayed and turned by his interests, his passions, and his vices.
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O Grub Street! how do I bemoan thee, whose graceless children scorn to own thee! . Yet thou hast greater cause to be ashamed of them, than they of thee.
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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.
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Men are happy to be laughed at for their humor, but not for their folly.
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Philosophy! the lumber of the schools.
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Reasoning will never make a man correct an ill opinion, which by reasoning he never acquired
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Pray steal me not, I'm Mrs. Dingley's, Whose heart in this four-footed thing lies.
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Ah, a German and a genius ! A prodigy, admit him !
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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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Many a truth is told in jest.
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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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Politics, as the word is commonly understood, are nothing but corruptions.
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In all distresses of our friends We first consult our private ends While Nature, kindly bent to ease us, Points out some circumstance to please us.
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