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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
Simplicity
Performances
Perfection
Style
Human
Humans
Without
Arrive
Performance

More quotes by Jonathan Swift

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When men grow virtuous in their old age, they only make a sacrifice to God of the devil's leavings.
Jonathan Swift
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I always love to begin a journey on Sundays, because I shall have the prayers of the church to preserve all that travel by land, or water.
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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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It is pleasant to observe how free the present age is in laying taxes on the next. Future ages shall talk of this they shall be famous to all posterity whereas their time and thoughts will be taken up about present things, as ours are now.
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I cannot but conclude that the Bulk of your Natives, to be the most pernicious Race of little odious Vermin that Nature ever suffered to crawl upon the Surface of the Earth.
Jonathan Swift
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A fig for your bill of fare show me your bill of company.
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Very few men, properly speaking, live at present, but are providing to live another time.
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Modesty may make a fool seem a man of sense.
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You must take the will for the deed.
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No preacher is listened to but time, which gives us the same train and turn of thought that elder people have in vain tried to put into our heads before.
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Sweeping from butcher's stalls, dung, guts, and blood, Drown'd puppies, stinking sprats, all drench'd in mud, Dead cats, and turnip-tops, come tumbling down the flood.
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Promises and pie-crust are made to be broken.
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I never wonder to see men wicked, but I often wonder to see them not ashamed.
Jonathan Swift
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It is in men as in soils where sometimes there is a vein of gold which the owner knows not.
Jonathan Swift
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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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Faith, that's as well said as if I had said it myself.
Jonathan Swift
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I am of the level with common Astrologers who, with an old paltry cant, and a few pot-hooks for planets to amuse the vulgar, have too long been suffered to abuse the world.
Jonathan Swift
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As love without esteem is capricious and volatile esteem without love is languid and cold.
Jonathan Swift
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Under this window in stormy weather I marry this man and woman together Let none but Him who rules the thunder Put this man and woman asunder.
Jonathan Swift
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What we call the Irish Brogue is no sooner discovered, than it makes the deliverer, in the last degree, ridiculous and despised and, from such a mouth, an Englishman expects nothing but bulls, blunders, and follies.
Jonathan Swift