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A traveler's chief aim should be to make men wiser and better, and to improve their minds by the bad-as well as good example of what they deliver concerning foreign places.

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
Wells
Chiefs
Well
Improve
Mind
Aim
Make
Foreign
Concerning
Good
Minds
Traveler
Men
Places
Deliver
Example
Wiser
Better
Chief

More quotes by Jonathan Swift

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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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I cannot but conclude that the Bulk of your Natives, to be the most pernicious Race of little odious Vermin that Nature ever suffered to crawl upon the Surface of the Earth.
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Philosophy! the lumber of the schools.
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The first springs of great events, like those of great rivers, are often mean and little.
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You should never be ashamed to admit you have been wrong. It only proves you are wiser today than yesterday
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Bread is the staff of life.
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I would rather be a freeman among slaves than a slave among freemen.
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If you were not reasoned into your beliefs, you cannot be reasoned out of them.
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I am of the level with common Astrologers who, with an old paltry cant, and a few pot-hooks for planets to amuse the vulgar, have too long been suffered to abuse the world.
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Argument, as usually managed, is the worst sort of conversation, as it is generally in books the worst sort of reading.
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It is very unfair in any writer to employ ignorance and malice together, because it gives his answerer double work.
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Small causes are sufficient to make a man uneasy, when great ones are not in the way: for want of a block he will stumble at a straw.
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Do you think I was born in a wood to be afraid of an owl?
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You cannot reason a person out of something they were not reasoned into.
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Blot out, correct, insert, refine, enlarge, diminish, interline. Be mindful, when invention fails. To scratch your head and bite your nails.
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For poetry, he's past his prime, He takes an hour to find a rhyme His fire is out, his wit decayed, His fancy sunk, his muse a jade. I'd have him throw away his pen, But there's no talking to some men.
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Conversation is but carving! Give no more to every guest Than he's able to digest.
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It is in men as in soils where sometimes there is a vein of gold which the owner knows not.
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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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I shall be like that tree-I shall die at the top.
Jonathan Swift