"Walls have tongues, and hedges ears."
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Quote collection
Jonathan Swift quotes (page 16 of 22)
433 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"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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"The greatest Inventions were produced in Times of Ignorance; as the Use of the Compass, Gunpowder, and Printing; and by the dullest Nation, as the Germans."
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"The sciences are found, like Hercules's oxen, by tracing them backward; and old sciences are unravelled like old stockings, by beginning at the foot."
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"Few are qualified to shine in company, but it is in most men's power to be agreeable."
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"Neither are any wars so furious and bloody, or of so long continuance as those occasioned by difference in opinion, especially if it be in things indifferent."
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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."
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"All fits of pleasure are balanced by an equal degree of pain or languor; it is like spending this year part of the next year's revenue."
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"Ingratitude is amongst them a capital crime, as we read it to have been in some other countries: for they reason thus; that whoever makes ill-returns to his benefactor, must needs be a common enemy to the rest of the mankind, from where he has received no obligations and therefore such man is not fit to live."
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"Usually speaking, the worst-bred person in company is a young traveller just returned from abroad."
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"Sweeping from butcher's stalls, dung, guts, and blood, Drown'd puppies, stinking sprats, all drench'd in mud, Dead cats, and turnip-tops, come tumbling down the flood."
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"Books, like men their authors, have no more than one wayofcoming intothe world, but there areten thousand to go out of it, and return no more."
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"In oratory the greatest art is to hide art."
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"Not die here in a rage, like a poisoned rat in a hole."
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"A stander-by may sometimes, perhaps, see more of the game than he that plays it."
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"She has more goodness in her little finger than he has in his whole body."
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"Abstracts, abridgments, summaries, etc., have the same use with burning-glasses,--to collect the diffused light rays of wit and learning in authors, and make them point with warmth and quickness upon the reader's imagination."
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"She watches him as a cat would watch a mouse."
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"I won't quarrel with my bread and butter."
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"Dignity, high station, or great riches, are in some sort necessary to old men, in order to keep the younger at a distance, who are otherwise too apt to insult them upon the score of their age."
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