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You can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear.

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
Ears
Make
Turnips
Purse
Purses
Silk

More quotes by Jonathan Swift

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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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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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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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Rebukes are easy from our betters, From men of quality and letters But when low dunces will affront, What man alive can stand the brunt?
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Just get the right syllable in the proper place.
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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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Religion supposed Heaven and Hell, the word of God, and sacraments, and twenty other circumstances which, taken seriously, are a wonderful check to wit and humour.
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Men are happy to be laughed at for their humor, but not for their folly.
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It is an uncontrolled truth, that no man ever made an ill figure who understood his own talents, nor a good one who mistook them.
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This Day, whate'er the Fates decree Shall still be kept with Joy by me: This Day then, let us not be told, That you are sick, and I grown old
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Vision is seeing the invisible.
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Once kick the world, and the world and you will live together at a reasonably good understanding.
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A ridiculous passion which hath no being but in play-books and romances.
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Arbitrary power is but the first natural step from anarchy, or the savage life.
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Positiveness is a good quality for preachers and speakers because, whoever shares his thoughts with the public will convince them as he himself appears convinced.
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Under the rose, since here are none but friends, To own the truth we have some private ends.
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Books, the children of the brain.
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I'm as old as my tongue and a little older than my teeth.
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Modesty may make a fool seem a man of sense.
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Words are but wind and learning is nothing but words ergo, learning is nothing but wind.
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