The following 59 quotes match your criteria:
| Author: Jonathan Swift |
I ’ve often wish’d that I had clear,
For life, six hundred pounds a year;
A handsome house to lodge a friend;
A river at my garden’s end;
A terrace walk, and half a rood
Of land set out to plant a wood. |
| Imitation of Horace. Book ii. Sat. 6.
|
| Author: Jonathan Swift |
So geographers, in Afric maps,
With savage pictures fill their gaps,
And o’er unhabitable downs
Place elephants for want of towns. |
| Poetry, a Rhapsody.
|
| Author: Jonathan Swift |
Where Young must torture his invention
To flatter knaves, or lose his pension. |
| Poetry, a Rhapsody.
|
| Author: Jonathan Swift |
Hobbes clearly proves that every creature
Lives in a state of war by nature. |
| Poetry, a Rhapsody.
|
| Author: Jonathan Swift |
So, naturalists observe, a flea
Has smaller fleas that on him prey;
And these have smaller still to bite ’em;
And so proceed ad infinitum. |
| Poetry, a Rhapsody.
|
| Author: Jonathan Swift |
Libertas et natale solum:
Fine words! I wonder where you stole ’em. |
| Verses occasioned by Whitshed’s Motto on his Coach.
|
| Author: Jonathan Swift |
| A college joke to cure the dumps. |
| Cassinus and Peter.
|
| Author: Jonathan Swift |
’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. |
| Cadenus and Vanessa.
|
| Author: Jonathan Swift |
| Big-endians and small-endians. |
| Gulliver’s Travels. Part i. Chap. iv. Voyage to Lilliput.
|
| Author: Jonathan Swift |
| And he gave it for his opinion, that whoever could make two ears of corn, or two blades of grass, to grow upon a spot of ground where only one grew before, would deserve better of mankind, and do more essential service to his country, than the whole race |
| Gulliver’s Travels. Part ii. Chap. vii. Voyage to Brobdingnag.
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| Author: Jonathan Swift |
| He had been eight years upon a project for extracting sunbeams out of cucumbers, which were to be put in phials hermetically sealed, and let out to warm the air in raw inclement summers. |
| Gulliver’s Travels. Part iii. Chap. v. Voyage to Laputa.
|
| Author: Jonathan Swift |
| It is a maxim, that those to whom everybody allows the second place have an undoubted title to the first. |
| Tale of a Tub. Dedication.
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| Author: Jonathan Swift |
| Seamen have a custom, when they meet a whale, to fling him out an empty tub by way of amusement, to divert him from laying violent hands upon the ship. |
| Tale of a Tub. Preface.
|
| Author: Jonathan Swift |
| Bread is the staff of life. |
| Tale of a Tub. Preface.
|
| Author: Jonathan Swift |
| Books, the children of the brain. |
| Tale of a Tub. Sect. i.
|
| Author: Jonathan Swift |
| As boys do sparrows, with flinging salt upon their tails. |
| Tale of a Tub. Sect. vii.
|
| Author: Jonathan Swift |
| He made it a part of his religion never to say grace to his meat. |
| Tale of a Tub. Sect. xi.
|
| Author: Jonathan Swift |
| The two noblest things, which are sweetness and light. |
| Battle of the Books.
|
| Author: Jonathan Swift |
| The reason why so few marriages are happy is because young ladies spend their time in making nets, not in making cages. |
| Thoughts on Various Subjects.
|
| Author: Jonathan Swift |
| Censure is the tax a man pays to the public for being eminent. |
| Thoughts on Various Subjects.
|
| Author: Jonathan Swift |
| A nice man is a man of nasty ideas. |
| Thoughts on Various Subjects.
|
| Author: Jonathan Swift |
| If Heaven had looked upon riches to be a valuable thing, it would not have given them to such a scoundrel. |
| Letter to Miss Vanbromrigh, Aug. 12, 1720.
|
| Author: Jonathan Swift |
| Not die here in a rage, like a poisoned rat in a hole. |
| Letter to Bolingbroke, March 21, 1729.
|
| Author: Jonathan Swift |
| A penny for your thoughts. |
| Introduction to Polite Conversation.
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| Author: Jonathan Swift |
| Do you think I was born in a wood to be afraid of an owl? |
| Polite Conversation. Dialogue i.
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| Author: Jonathan Swift |
| The sight of you is good for sore eyes. |
| Polite Conversation. Dialogue i.
|
| Author: Jonathan Swift |
| ’T is as cheap sitting as standing. |
| Polite Conversation. Dialogue i.
|
| Author: Jonathan Swift |
| I hate nobody: I am in charity with the world. |
| Polite Conversation. Dialogue i.
|
| Author: Jonathan Swift |
| I won’t quarrel with my bread and butter. |
| Polite Conversation. Dialogue i.
|
| Author: Jonathan Swift |
| She ’s no chicken; she ’s on the wrong side of thirty, if she be a day. |
| Polite Conversation. Dialogue i.
|
| Author: Jonathan Swift |
| She looks as if butter wou’dn’t melt in her mouth. |
| Polite Conversation. Dialogue i.
|
| Author: Jonathan Swift |
| If it had been a bear it would have bit you. |
| Polite Conversation. Dialogue i.
|
| Author: Jonathan Swift |
| She wears her clothes as if they were thrown on with a pitchfork. |
| Polite Conversation. Dialogue i.
|
| Author: Jonathan Swift |
| I mean you lie—under a mistake. |
| Polite Conversation. Dialogue i.
|
| Author: Jonathan Swift |
Lord M. What religion is he of?
Lord Sp. Why, he is an Anythingarian. |
| Polite Conversation. Dialogue i.
|
| Author: Jonathan Swift |
| He was a bold man that first eat an oyster. |
| Polite Conversation. Dialogue ii.
|
| Author: Jonathan Swift |
| That is as well said as if I had said it myself. |
| Polite Conversation. Dialogue ii.
|
| Author: Jonathan Swift |
| You must take the will for the deed. |
| Polite Conversation. Dialogue ii.
|
| Author: Jonathan Swift |
| Fingers were made before forks, and hands before knives. |
| Polite Conversation. Dialogue ii.
|
| Author: Jonathan Swift |
| She has more goodness in her little finger than he has in his whole body. |
| Polite Conversation. Dialogue ii.
|
| Author: Jonathan Swift |
| Lord! I wonder what fool it was that first invented kissing. |
| Polite Conversation. Dialogue ii.
|
| Author: Jonathan Swift |
| They say a carpenter ’s known by his chips. |
| Polite Conversation. Dialogue ii.
|
| Author: Jonathan Swift |
| The best doctors in the world are Doctor Diet, Doctor Quiet, and Doctor Merryman. |
| Polite Conversation. Dialogue ii.
|
| Author: Jonathan Swift |
| I ’ll give you leave to call me anything, if you don’t call me “spade.” |
| Polite Conversation. Dialogue ii.
|
| Author: Jonathan Swift |
| May you live all the days of your life. |
| Polite Conversation. Dialogue ii.
|
| Author: Jonathan Swift |
| I have fed like a farmer: I shall grow as fat as a porpoise. |
| Polite Conversation. Dialogue ii.
|
| Author: Jonathan Swift |
| I always like to begin a journey on Sundays, because I shall have the prayers of the Church to preserve all that travel by land or by water. |
| Polite Conversation. Dialogue ii.
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| Author: Jonathan Swift |
| I know Sir John will go, though he was sure it would rain cats and dogs. |
| Polite Conversation. Dialogue ii.
|
| Author: Jonathan Swift |
| I thought you and he were hand-in-glove. |
| Polite Conversation. Dialogue ii.
|
| Author: Jonathan Swift |
| ’T is happy for him that his father was before him. |
| Polite Conversation. Dialogue iii.
|
| Author: Jonathan Swift |
| There is none so blind as they that won’t see. |
| Polite Conversation. Dialogue iii.
|
| Author: Jonathan Swift |
| She watches him as a cat would watch a mouse. |
| Polite Conversation. Dialogue iii.
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| Author: Jonathan Swift |
| She pays him in his own coin. |
| Polite Conversation. Dialogue iii.
|
| Author: Jonathan Swift |
| There was all the world and his wife. |
| Polite Conversation. Dialogue iii.
|
| Author: Jonathan Swift |
| Sharp ’s the word with her. |
| Polite Conversation. Dialogue iii.
|
| Author: Jonathan Swift |
| There ’s two words to that bargain. |
| Polite Conversation. Dialogue iii.
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| Author: Jonathan Swift |
| I shall be like that tree,—I shall die at the top. |
| Scott’s Life of Swift.
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