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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
Misfortune
Misfortunes
Match
Friend
Enemy
Friends
Dire

More quotes by Jonathan Swift

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This Day, whate'er the Fates decree Shall still be kept with Joy by me: This Day then, let us not be told, That you are sick, and I grown old
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Modesty may make a fool seem a man of sense.
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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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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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Pedantry is properly the over-rating of any kind of knowledge we pretend to.
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Triumphant Tories, and desponding Whigs, Forget their feuds, and join to save their wigs.
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I remember it was with extreme difficulty that I could bring my master to understand the meaning of the word opinion, or how a point could be disputable because reason taught us to affirm or deny only where we are certain and beyond our knowledge we cannot do either.
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You cannot reason a person out of something they were not reasoned into.
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This made me reflect, how vain an attempt it is for a man to endeavor to do himself honor among those who are out of all degree of equality or comparison with him.
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A little grain of the romance is no ill ingredient to preserve and exalt the dignity of human nature, without which it is apt to degenerate into everything that is sordid, vicious and low.
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Politics, as the word is commonly understood, are nothing but corruptions.
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An intelligent person should put money in the beginning, but not in heart
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The axe of intemperance has lopped off his green boughs and left him a withered trunk.
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By candle-light nobody would have taken you for above five-and-twenty.
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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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Principally I hate and detest that animal called man although I heartily love John, Peter, Thomas, and so forth.
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And, is not Virtue in Mankind The Nutriment that feeds the Mind?
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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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My Lawyer being practiced almost from his Cradle in defending Falsehood is quite out of his Element when he would be an Advocate for Justice, which as an Office unnatural, he always attempts with great Awkwardness if not with Ill-will.
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If the world had but a dozen Arbuthnots in it, I would burn my Travels.
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