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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
Perfection
Style
Human
Humans
Without
Arrive
Performance
Simplicity
Performances

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In all distresses of our friends We first consult our private ends While Nature, kindly bent to ease us, Points out some circumstance to please us.
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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.
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A Child will make two Dishes at an Entertainment for Friends and when the Family dines alone, the fore or hind Quarter will makea reasonable Dish and seasoned with a little Pepper or Salt, will be very good Boiled on the fourth Day, especially in Winter.
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It often happens that, if a lie be believed only for an hour, it has done its work, and there is no further occasion for it.
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Few are qualified to shine in company, but it is in most men's power to be agreeable.
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A wise man will find us to be rogues by our faces.
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No man was ever so completely skilled in the conduct of life, as not to receive new information from age and experience.
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Let a man be ne'er so wise, he may be caught with sober lies.
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Fine words! I wonder where you stole them.
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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.
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Lord, Madame, I have fed like a farmer I shall grow as fat as a porpoise.
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When a true genius appears, you can know him by this sign: that all the dunces are in a confederacy against him.
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There are but three ways for a man to revenge himself of the censure of the world,--to despise it, to return the like, or to endeavor to live so as to avoid it the first of these is usually pretended, the last is almost impossible, the universal practice is for the second.
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The two maxims of any great man at court are, always to keep his countenance, and never to keep his word.
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Your onions should be thoroughly boiled.
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Real vision is the ability to see the invisible.
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It is a maxim, that those, to whom everybody allows the second place, have an undoubted title to the first.
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And, is not Virtue in Mankind The Nutriment that feeds the Mind?
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They say fingers were made before forks, and hands before knives.
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With a whirl of thought oppressed I sink from reverie to rest. An horrid vision seized my head, I saw the graves give up their dead.
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