662 Quotes by Jonathan Swift

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.

What they do in heaven we are ignorant of; what they do not do we are told expressly.

Vain men delight in telling what Honours have been done them, what great Company they have kept, and the like; by which they plainly confess, that these Honours were more than their Due, and such as their Friends would not believe if they had not been told: Whereas a Man truly proud, thinks the greatest Honours below his Merit, and consequently scorns to boast. I therefore deliver it as a Maxim that whoever desires the Character of a proud Man, ought to conceal his Vanity.

There seems to be no part of knowledge in fewer hands than that of discerning when to have done.

I've often wish'd that I had clear, For life, six hundred pounds a year; A handsome house to lodge a friend; A river at my garden's end; A terrace walk, and half a rood Of land set out to plant a wood.

Triumphant Tories, and desponding Whigs, Forget their feuds, and join to save their wigs.

There were many times my pants were so thin I could sit on a dime and tell if it was heads or tails.

Though Diogenes lived in a tub, there might be, for aught I know, as much pride under his rags, as in the fine-spun garments of the divine Plato.

She 's no chicken; she 's on the wrong side of thirty, if she be a day.