Quote

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.

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
Done
Conversation
Speaker
Failing
Speakers
Sort
Restraint
Support
Fails
Company
Wit
Upon
Perpetual
Part
Insult
Character
Generally
Aiming

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You can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear.
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Had Windham possessed discretion in debate, or Sheridan in conduct, they might have ruled their age.
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Pride, ill nature, and want of sense, are the three great sources of ill manners.
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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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It is the first rule in oratory that a man must appear such as he would persuade others to be: and that can be accomplished only by the force of his life.
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That incessant envy wherewith the common rate of mankind pursues all superior natures to their own.
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A fig for your bill of fare show me your bill of company.
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Faith, that's as well said as if I had said it myself.
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Ah, a German and a genius ! A prodigy, admit him !
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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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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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Men who possess all the advantages of life are in a state where there are many accidents to disorder and discompose, but few to please them.
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The preaching of divines helps to preserve well-inclined men in the course of virtue, but seldom or ever reclaims the vicious.
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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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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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Promises and pie-crust are made to be broken.
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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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I never wonder to see men wicked, but I often wonder to see them not ashamed.
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Everybody wants to live forever, but nobody wants to grow old.
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