Quote

Story-telling is subject to two unavoidable defects,--frequent repetition and being soon exhausted so that, whoever values this gift in himself, has need of a good memory, and ought frequently to shift his company.

Jonathan Swift

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Good
Memories
Whoever
Company
Memory
Unavoidable
Story
Subject
Frequent
Values
Telling
Defects
Two
Gift
Repetition
Stories
Soon
Shift
Need
Subjects
Exhausted
Needs
Ought
Frequently

More quotes by Jonathan Swift

Image
The more careless, the more modish.
Jonathan Swift
Image
In oratory the greatest art is to hide art.
Jonathan Swift
Image
Principally I hate and detest that animal called man although I heartily love John, Peter, Thomas, and so forth.
Jonathan Swift
Image
It is impossible that anything so natural, so necessary, and so universal as death, should ever have been designed by providence as an evil to mankind.
Jonathan Swift
Image
In church your grandsire cut his throat to do the job too long he tarried: he should have had my hearty vote to cut his throat before he married.
Jonathan Swift
Image
Reason is a very light rider, and easily shook off.
Jonathan Swift
Image
Good manners is the art of making those people easy with whom we converse. Whoever makes the fewest people uneasy is the best bred in the room.
Jonathan Swift
Image
Fond of those hives where folly reigns, And cards and scandal are the chains, Where the pert virgin slights a name, And scorns to redden into shame.
Jonathan Swift
Image
Politics, as the word is commonly understood, are nothing but corruptions.
Jonathan Swift
Image
Where Young must torture his invention To flatter knaves, or lose his pension.
Jonathan Swift
Image
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.
Jonathan Swift
Image
The preaching of divines helps to preserve well-inclined men in the course of virtue, but seldom or ever reclaims the vicious.
Jonathan Swift
Image
He was a bold man that first ate an oyster.
Jonathan Swift
Image
My father had a small Estate in Nottinghamshire I was the Third of five Sons.
Jonathan Swift
Image
Every day is an opportunity to make a new happy ending. May you live all the days of your life.
Jonathan Swift
Image
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.
Jonathan Swift
Image
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.
Jonathan Swift
Image
Desponding Phyllis was endu'd With ev'ry Talent of a Prude, She trembled when a Man drew near Salute her, and she turn'd her Ear: If o'er against her you were plac'd She durst not look above your Waist
Jonathan Swift
Image
I would rather be a freeman among slaves than a slave among freemen.
Jonathan Swift
Image
Everybody wants to live forever, but nobody wants to grow old.
Jonathan Swift