Quote

Careful observers may foretell the hour (By sure prognostics) when to dread a show'r. While rain depends, the pensive cat gives o'er Her frolics, and pursues her tail no more.

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
Depends
Tails
Gives
Dread
Sure
Observation
Hours
Cat
Foretell
Show
Pursue
Pensive
Shows
Careful
Pursues
May
Hour
Tail
Giving
Rain
Observers

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Vanity is a mark of humility rather than of pride.
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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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A carpenter is known by his chips.
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That incessant envy wherewith the common rate of mankind pursues all superior natures to their own.
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So, naturalists observe, a flea Hath smaller fleas that on him prey And these have smaller fleas to bite 'em, And so proceed ad infinitum.
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Everybody wants to live forever, but nobody wants to grow old.
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Some dire misfortune to portend, no enemy can match a friend.
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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.
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No man will take counsel, but every man will take money. Therefore, money is better than counsel.
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This wine should be eaten, it is too good to be drunk.
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A footman may swear but he cannot swear like a lord. He can swear as often: but can he swear with equal delicacy, propriety, and judgment?
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A true critic, in the perusal of a book, is like a dog at a feast, whose thoughts and stomach are wholly set upon what the guests fling away, and consequently is apt to snarl most when there are the fewest bones.
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Conversation is but carving! Give no more to every guest Than he's able to digest.
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111 company is like a dog, who dirts those most whom he loves best.
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You cannot reason a person out of something they were not reasoned into.
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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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Last week I saw a woman flayed, and you will hardly believe, how much it altered her person for the worse.
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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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That was excellently observed’, say I, when I read a passage in an author, where his opinion agrees with mine. When we differ, there I pronounce him to be mistaken.
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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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