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Pride, ill nature, and want of sense are the three great sources of ill manners without some one of these defects, no man will behave himself ill for want of experience, or what, in the language of fools, is called knowing the world.

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
World
Language
Ill
Experience
Manners
Sense
Behave
Three
Pride
Nature
Fool
Without
Source
Defects
Great
Called
Sources
Men
Knowing
Fools

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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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Polite Conversation Why, everyone one as they like as the good woman said when she kissed her cow.
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Triumphant Tories, and desponding Whigs, Forget their feuds, and join to save their wigs.
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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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That the universe was formed by a fortuitous concourse of atoms, I will no more believe than that the accidental jumbling of the alphabet would fall into a most ingenious treatise of philosophy.
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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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I would rather be a freeman among slaves than a slave among freemen.
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She has more goodness in her little finger than he has in his whole body.
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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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Philosophy! the lumber of the schools.
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It is in men as in soils where sometimes there is a vein of gold which the owner knows not.
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He was a fiddler, and consequently a rogue.
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If you were not reasoned into your beliefs, you cannot be reasoned out of them.
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You can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear.
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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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A lie is an excuse guarded
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Old men and comets have been reverenced for the same reason: their long beards, and pretences to foretell events.
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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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The stoical scheme of supplying our wants by lopping off our desires, is like cutting off our feet when we want shoes.
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Hail fellow, well met.
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