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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
Folly
Ease
Delight
Anger
Sex
Equal
Daphne
Please
Vex
Makes
Sole

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What vexes me most is, that my female friends, who could bear me very well a dozen years ago, have now forsaken me, although I am not so old in proportion to them as I formerly was: which I can prove by arithmetic, for then I was double their age, which now I am not. Letter to Alexander Pope. 7 Feb. 1736.
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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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No man will take counsel, but every man will take money. Therefore, money is better than counsel.
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I wonder what fool it was that first invented kissing.
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There are few, very few, that will own themselves in a mistake.
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If the men of wit and genius would resolve never to complain in their works of critics and detractors, the next age would not know that they ever had any.
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I have been assured by a very knowing American of my acquaintance in London, that a young healthy child well nursed is at a year old a most delicious, nourishing, and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled and I make no doubt that it will equally serve in a fricassee or a ragout.
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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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Praise is the daughter of present power.
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Liberty of conscience is nowadays only understood to be the liberty of believing what men please, but also of endeavoring to propagate that belief as much as they can.
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Books, the children of the brain.
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Pride, ill nature, and want of sense, are the three great sources of ill manners.
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Hail fellow, well met.
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Vision is seeing the invisible.
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A college joke to cure the dumps.
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Do you think I was born in a wood to be afraid of an owl?
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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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A forward critic often dupes us With sham quotations peri hupsos, And if we have not read Longinus, Will magisterially outshine us. Then, lest with Greek he over-run ye, Procure the book for love or money, Translated from Boileau's translation, And quote quotation on quotation.
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