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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
Style
Human
Humans
Without
Arrive
Performance
Simplicity
Performances
Perfection

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He that calls a man ungrateful sums up all the veil that a man can be guilty of.
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War: that mad game the world so loves to play.
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Arbitrary power is but the first natural step from anarchy, or the savage life.
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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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Ale is meat, drink and cloth it will make a cat speak and a wise man dumb.
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Promises and pie-crust are made to be broken.
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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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He was a fiddler, and consequently a rogue.
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For poetry, he's past his prime, He takes an hour to find a rhyme His fire is out, his wit decayed, His fancy sunk, his muse a jade. I'd have him throw away his pen, But there's no talking to some men.
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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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I row after health like a waterman.
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Fine words! I wonder where you stole them.
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If a lump of soot falls into the soup and you cannot conveniently get it out, stir it well in and it will give the soup a French taste.
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A traveler's chief aim should be to make men wiser and better, and to improve their minds by the bad-as well as good example of what they deliver concerning foreign places.
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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.
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The latter part of a wise person's life is occupied with curing the follies, prejudices and false opinions they contracted earlier.
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Come, agree, the law's costly.
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Two women seldom grow intimate but at the expense of a third person.
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I hate nobody: I am in charity with the world.
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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.
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