Jonathan Swift

Don't set your wit against a child.

He was a fiddler, and consequently a rogue.

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

Politics, as the word is commonly understood, are nothing but corruptions.

As love without esteem is capricious and volatile; esteem without love is languid and cold.

Power is no blessing in itself, except when it is used to protect the innocent.

There is nothing constant in this world but inconsistency.

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

The best doctors in the world are Doctor Diet, Doctor Quiet, and Doctor Merryman.

Vanity is a mark of humility rather than of pride.

Nothing is so hard for those who abound in riches as to conceive how others can be in want.

A wise man should have money in his head, but not in his heart.

Good manners is the art of making those people easy with whom we converse. Whoever makes the fewest people uneasy is the best bred in the room.

Blot out, correct, insert, refine, enlarge, diminish, interline. Be mindful, when invention fails. To scratch your head and bite your nails.

Where Young must torture his invention To flatter knaves, or lose his pension.

So, naturalists observe, a flea; Hath smaller fleas that on him prey; And these have smaller fleas to bite 'em, And so proceed ad infinitum.

You cannot reason a person out of something they were not reasoned into.

When I am reading a book, whether wise or silly, it seems to me to be alive and talking to me.

For to enter the palace of learning at the great gate requires an expense of time and forms, therefore men of much haste and little ceremony are content to get in by the back-door

If they would, for Example, praise the Beauty of a Woman, or any other Animal, they describe it by Rhombs, Circles, Parallelograms, Ellipses, and other geometrical terms.

'T is an old maxim in the schools, That flattery 's the food of fools; Yet now and then your men of wit Will condescend to take a bit.