JONATHAN SWIFT

I never wonder to see men wicked, but I often wonder to see them not ashamed.

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

Where I am not understood, it shall be concluded that something very useful and profound is couched underneath.

Every man desires to live long, but no man wishes to be old.

Although men are accused of not knowing their own weakness, yet perhaps few know their own strength. It is in men as in soils, where sometimes there is a vein of gold which the owner knows not of.

Better belly burst than good liquor be lost.

There is nothing constant in this world but inconsistency.

We are so fond on one another because our ailments are the same.

Poor nations are hungry, and rich nations are proud; and pride and hunger will ever be at variance.

Vision is the art of seeing what is invisible to others.

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.

Vanity is a mark of humility rather than of pride.

Observation is an old man's memory.

Books, the children of the brain.

Censure is the tax a man pays to the public for being eminent.

He was a bold man that first ate an oyster.

The latter part of a wise person's life is occupied with curing the follies, prejudices and false opinions they contracted earlier.

My nose itched, and I knew I should drink wine or kiss a fool.

Where there are large powers with little ambition... nature may be said to have fallen short of her purposes.

Invention is the talent of youth, as judgment is of age.

I never knew a man come to greatness or eminence who lay abed late in the morning.

The power of fortune is confessed only by the miserable, for the happy impute all their success to prudence or merit.

No man was ever so completely skilled in the conduct of life, as not to receive new information from age and experience.

Human brutes, like other beasts, find snares and poison in the provision of life, and are allured by their appetites to their destruction.

A lie does not consist in the indirect position of words, but in the desire and intention, by false speaking, to deceive and injure your neighbour.