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

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Two women seldom grow intimate but at the expense of a third person.
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Story-telling is subject to two unavoidable defects,--frequent repetition and being soon exhausted so that, whoever values this gift in himself, has need of a good memory, and ought frequently to shift his company.
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What religion is he of? Why, he is an Anythingarian.
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A lie is an excuse guarded
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Everyone desires long life, not one old age.
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That incessant envy wherewith the common rate of mankind pursues all superior natures to their own.
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She 's no chicken she 's on the wrong side of thirty, if she be a day.
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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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There's none so blind as they that won't see.
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But you think that it is time for me to have done with the world, and so I would if I could get into a better before I was called into the best, and not die here in a rage, like a poisoned rat in a hole.
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Bread is the staff of life.
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The stoical scheme of supplying our wants by lopping off our desires, is like cutting off our feet when we want shoes.
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Praise is the daughter of present power.
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I'm as old as my tongue and a little older than my teeth.
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Pride, ill nature, and want of sense are the three great sources of ill manners without some one of these defects, no man will behave himself ill for want of experience, or what, in the language of fools, is called knowing the world.
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Big-endians and small-endians.
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I'm up and down and round about, Yet all the world can't find me out Though hundreds have employed their leisure, They never yet could find my measure.
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It is impossible that anything so natural, so necessary, and so universal as death, should ever have been designed by providence as an evil to mankind.
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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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Let a man be ne'er so wise, he may be caught with sober lies.
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