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Daphne knows, with equal ease, How to vex and how to please But the folly of her sex Makes her sole delight to vex.

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
Sex
Equal
Daphne
Please
Vex
Makes
Sole
Folly
Ease
Delight
Anger

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I wonder what fool it was that first invented kissing.
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Men of great parts are often unfortunate in the management of public business, because they are apt to go out of the common road by the quickness of their imagination.
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There is no quality so contrary to any nature which one cannot affect, and put on upon occasion, in order to serve an interest.
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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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The best Maxim I know in this life is, to drink your Coffee when you can, and when you cannot, to be easy without it. While you continue to be splenetic, count upon it I will always preach. Thus much I sympathize with you that I am not cheerful enough to write, for I believe Coffee once a week is necessary to that.
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Old men and comets have been reverenced for the same reason: their long beards, and pretences to foretell events.
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What religion is he of? Why, he is an Anythingarian.
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I won't quarrel with my bread and butter.
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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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It may pass for a maxim in State, that the administration cannot be placed in too few hands, nor the legislature in too many.
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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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Whoe'er excels in what we prize, Appears a hero in our eyes Each girl, when pleased with what is taught, Will have the teacher in her thought. . . . . A blockhead with melodious voice, In boarding-schools may have his choice.
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Books, the children of the brain.
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There is nothing constant in this world but inconsistency.
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A lie does not consist in the indirect position of words, but in the desire and intention, by false speaking, to deceive and injure your neighbour.
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I shall be like that tree-I shall die at the top.
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It is pleasant to observe how free the present age is in laying taxes on the next. Future ages shall talk of this they shall be famous to all posterity whereas their time and thoughts will be taken up about present things, as ours are now.
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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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There are few, very few, that will own themselves in a mistake.
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A jargon form'd from the lost language, wit, Confounded in that Babel of the pit Form'd by diseased conceptions, weak and wild, Sick lust of souls, and an abortive child Born between whores and fops, by lewd compacts, Before the play, or else between the acts Nor wonder, if from such polluted minds Should spring such short and transitory kinds.
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