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I cannot imagine why we should be at the expense to furnish wit for succeeding ages, when the former have made no sort of provision for ours.

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
Succeed
Furnish
Sort
Succeeding
Imagine
Provision
Age
Expense
Cannot
Expenses
Made
Wit
Ages
Former

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When men grow virtuous in their old age, they only make a sacrifice to God of the devil's leavings.
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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.
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Unjustly poets we asperse: Truth shines the brighter clad in verse, And all the fictions they pursue Do but insinuate what is true.
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What they do in heaven we are ignorant of what they do not do we are told expressly.
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Perpetual aiming at wit is a very bad part of conversation. It is done to support a character: it generally fails it is a sort of insult on the company, and a restraint upon the speaker.
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Imaginary evils soon become real ones by indulging our reflections on them as he who in a melancholy fancy sees something like a face on the wall or the wainscot can, by two or three touches with a lead pencil, make it look visible, and agreeing with what he fancied.
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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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The affectation of some late authors to introduce and multiply cant words is the most ruinous corruption in any language.
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The system of morality to be gathered from the ancient sages falls very short of that delivered in the gospel.
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Possession, they say, is eleven points of the law.
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Conversation is but carving! Give no more to every guest Than he's able to digest.
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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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Ingratitude is amongst them a capital crime, as we read it to have been in some other countries: for they reason thus that whoever makes ill-returns to his benefactor, must needs be a common enemy to the rest of the mankind, from where he has received no obligations and therefore such man is not fit to live.
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If a man would register all his opinions upon love, politics, religion, learning etc., beginning from his youth, and so go to old age, what a bundle of inconsistencies and contradictions would appear at last.
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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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'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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It is useless to attempt to reason a man out of a thing he was never reasoned into.
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Tis nothing when you are used to it.
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Very few men, properly speaking, live at present, but are providing to live another time.
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The bulk of mankind is as well equipped for flying as thinking.
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