Jonathan Swift Quotes

There are no secrets better kept than the secrets everybody guesses.

Sometimes I feel like I must be hinting at this deep well of knowledge when, really, I just skim off the surface.

The reality of what we really are is often times found in the small snips, way down at the bottom of things.

Though I was careful never to mention it, I began to see a new dimension in everything that happened.

Yet the deepest truths are best read between the lines, and, for the most part, refuse to be written.

Archives exist because there's something that can't necessarily be articulated. Something is said in the gaps between all the information.

Every deep thinker is more afraid of being understood than of being misunderstood.

Love a friend, love a wife, something, whatever you like, but one must love with a lofty and serious intimate sympathy, with strength, with intelligence, and one must always try to know deeper, better, and more.

Fiction doesn’t tell us something we don’t know, it tells us something we know but don’t know that we know.

I immediately suspected there was much more to it than was being said.

The reality of the other person is not in what he reveals to you, but in what he cannot reveal to you. Therefore, if you would understand him, listen not to what he says but rather to what he does not say.

Poetry reminds us of the truths about life and human nature that we knew all along, but forgot somehow because they weren't yet in memorable language.

I know more than I can express in words, and the little I can express would not have been expressed, had I not known more.

Something tells me my spit wouldn't mean as much to Corr as yours would." There's a long Pause before Sean speaks. He says, "Maybe not yet." Yet! I don't think I've ever heard such a fine word before.

Another world must surely exist somewhere one where she would be known in some deep way that was far beyond words.

The unsaid part is the best of every discourse.

If you pay attention to the movies they will tell you what people desire and fear. Movies are hardly ever about what they seem to be about. Look at a movie that a lot of people love, and you will find something profound, no matter how silly the film may be.

To him who knows how to read the legend, it conveys more truth than the chronicle.

Some people spend their entire lives reading but never get beyond reading the words on the page, they don't understand that the words are merely stepping stones placed across a fast-flowing river, and the reason they're there is so that we can reach the farther shore, it's the other side that matters...

You say, "But He has not answered." He has, He is so near to you that His silence is the answer. His silence is big with terrific meaning that you cannot understand yet, but presently you will.

It's like a magic well. You think you know everything about [a] photograph, you think you've gotten everything out of it, and all of a sudden I see things in it I'd never seen before.

Ninety percent of what youre saying isnt coming out of your mouth.

The immense profundity of thought in vulgar locutions, like holes dug by generations of ants.

Wise books For half the truths they hold are honored tombs.

Later, however, I came to recognize the objective nature of these dreams or fantasies ... Thus it was that I gradually came to acknowledge that such fantasies or dreams are neither meaningless nor purely arbitrary but rather convey a sort of "second meaning" of the terms applied.