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Simplicity, without which no human performance can arrive at perfection.

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
Performance
Simplicity
Performances
Perfection
Style
Human
Humans
Without
Arrive

More quotes by Jonathan Swift

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'T is an old maxim in the schools, That flattery 's the food of fools Yet now and then your men of wit Will condescend to take a bit.
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Punning is a talent which no man affects to despise but he that is without it.
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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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There is nothing in this world constant, but inconstancy.
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All fits of pleasure are balanced by an equal degree of pain or languor it is like spending this year part of the next year's revenue.
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Two friendships in two breasts requires The same aversions and desires.
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Some dire misfortune to portend, no enemy can match a friend.
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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.
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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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I'll give you leave to call me anything, if you don't call me spade.
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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.
Jonathan Swift
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The example alone of a vicious prince will corrupt an age but that of a good one will not reform it.
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Politics, as the word is commonly understood, are nothing but corruptions.
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Last week I saw a woman flayed, and you will hardly believe, how much it altered her person for the worse.
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Then, rising with Aurora's light, The Muse invoked, sit down to write Blot out, correct, insert, refine, Enlarge, diminish, interline.
Jonathan Swift
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It is an uncontrolled truth, that no man ever made an ill figure who understood his own talents, nor a good one who mistook them.
Jonathan Swift
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Although men are accused of not knowing their own weakness, yet perhaps few know their own strength. It is in men as in soils, where sometimes there is a vein of gold which the owner knows not of.
Jonathan Swift
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Come, agree, the law's costly.
Jonathan Swift
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Careful observers may foretell the hour (By sure prognostics) when to dread a show'r. While rain depends, the pensive cat gives o'er Her frolics, and pursues her tail no more.
Jonathan Swift
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You must take the will for the deed.
Jonathan Swift