Jonathan Swift Quotes

Necessity is not a fact; it's an interpretation.

I love that perhaps we don't see the things that are there because we have no yardstick to see things by, to compare them.

The knowable world is incomplete if seen from any one point of view, incoherent if seen from all points of view at once, and empty if seen from nowhere in particular.

Beauty, my dear Sir, is not so much a quality of the object beheld, as an effect in him who beholds it. If our sight were longer or shorter, or if our constitution were different, what now appears beautiful to us would seem misshapen, and what we now think misshapen we should regard as beautiful. The most beautiful hand seen through the microscope will appear horrible. Some things are beautiful at a distance, but ugly near;

Beauty is only about relationships. Nothing is beautiful on its own.

We do not judge men by what they are in themselves, but by what they are relatively to us.

Everything that you receive is not measured according to its actual size, but, rather that of the receiving vessel.

A dwarf is small even if he stands on a mountain; a colossus keeps his height, even if he stands in a well.

What you see and what you hear depends a great deal on where you are standing. It also depends on what sort of person you are.

There is no quality in this world that is not what it is merely by contrast. Nothing exists in itself.

There are no great people. There are only great topics.

A weed is no more than a flower in disguise, Which is seen through at once, if love give a man eyes.

The world is a song, but we do not know whether it is a good song because we have nothing to compare it with.

It's often said that life is strange. But compared to what?

One man's constant is another man's variable.

One and the same thing can at the same time be good, bad, and indifferent, e.g., music is good to the melancholy, bad to those who mourn, and neither good nor bad to the deaf.

Nothing's beautiful from every point of view.

Every question is a hypothetical question for everyone but the person who asks it.

The meaning of things lies not in the things themselves, but in our attitude towards them.

As far as me knowing if Frank was a genius - in those days, I thought Einstein was the only genius around.

No object is so beautiful that, under certain conditions, it will not look ugly.

What may appear as a towering peak to one may seem but an ordinary eminence to another.

The beauty about history is that it's open to perception.

To the critical intelligence, nothing is left of absolute reality.

The way you see things depends a great deal on where you look at them from.