May you live every day of your life.
Vision is the art of seeing things invisible.
When a great genius appears in the world you may know him by this sign; that the dunces are all in confederacy against him." [Thoughts on Various Subjects]
Books, the children of the brain.
We have just enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love one another.
Every man desires to live long, but no man wishes to be old.
I never wonder to see men wicked, but I often wonder to see them not ashamed.
It is useless to attempt to reason a man out of a thing he was never reasoned into.
Laws are like cobwebs, which may catch small flies, but let wasps and hornets break through.
He was a bold man that first ate an oyster.
I cannot but conclude that the Bulk of your Natives, to be the most pernicious Race of little odious Vermin that Nature ever suffered to crawl upon the Surface of the Earth.
Fine words! I wonder where you stole them.
Every dog must have his day.
Proper words in proper places make the true definition of style.
Undoubtedly, philosophers are in the right when they tell us that nothing is great or little otherwise than by comparison.
No wise man ever wished to be younger.
You should never be ashamed to admit you have been wrong. It only proves you are wiser today than yesterday
The tiny Lilliputians surmise that Gulliver's watch may be his god, because it is that which, he admits, he seldom does anything without consulting.
Happiness is the perpetual possession of being well deceived.
There are few, very few, that will own themselves in a mistake.
For in reason, all government without the consent of the governed is the very definition of slavery.
We of this age have discovered a shorter, and more prudent method to become scholars and wits, without the fatigue of reading or of thinking.
If a man makes me keep my distance, the comfort is, he keeps his at the same time.
That was excellently observed’, say I, when I read a passage in an author, where his opinion agrees with mine. When we differ, there I pronounce him to be mistaken.
Some men, under the notion of weeding out prejudice, eradicate virtue, honesty and religion.
Ever eating, never cloying, All-devouring, all-destroying Never finding full repast, Till I eat the world at last.
Difference in opinions has cost many millions of lives: for instance, whether flesh be bread, or bread be flesh; whether the juice of a certain berry be blood or wine.
The latter part of a wise person's life is occupied with curing the follies, prejudices and false opinions they contracted earlier.
This made me reflect, how vain an attempt it is for a man to endeavor to do himself honor among those who are out of all degree of equality or comparison with him.
Satire is a sort of glass, wherein beholders do generally discover everybody's face but their own.
A soldier is a "Yahoo" hired to kill in cold blood as many of his own Species, who have never offended him, as possibly he can.
The best doctors in the world are Doctor Diet, Doctor Quiet, and Doctor Merryman.
Good manners is the art of making people comfortable. Whoever makes the fewest people uncomfortable has the best manners.
... a wife should be always a reasonable and agreeable companion, because she cannot always be young.
Punning is a talent which no man affects to despise but he that is without it.
Coffee makes us severe, and grave and philosophical.
Words are the clothing of our thoughts.
The stoical scheme of supplying our wants by lopping off our desires, is like cutting off our feet, when we want shoes.
Poor Nations are hungry, and rich Nations are proud, and Pride and Hunger will ever be at Variance.
We have chosen to fill our hives with honey and wax; thus furnishing mankind with the two noblest of things, which are sweetness and light.
As blushing will sometimes make a whore pass for a virtuous woman, so modesty may make a fool seem a man of sense.
Opium is not so stupefying to many persons as an afternoon sermon.
...I hid myself between two leaves of sorrel, and there discharged the necessities of nature.
I'm as old as my tongue and a little older than my teeth.
Of so little weight are the greatest services to princes, when put into the balance with a refusal to gratify their passions.
Gulliver describes a royal personage inspiring awe among the tiny Lilliputians because he was taller than his brethren by the breadth of a human fingernail.
As love without esteem is capricious and volatile; esteem without love is languid and cold.
That the universe was formed by a fortuitous concourse of atoms, I will no more believe than that the accidental jumbling of the alphabet would fall into a most ingenious treatise of philosophy.
I heartily hate and detest that animal called man, although I heartily love John, Peter, Thomas, ans so forth.
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.
When the world has once begun to use us ill, it afterwards continues the same treatment with less scruple or ceremony, as men do to a whore.
So Geographers in Afric-maps With Savage-Pictures fill their Gaps; And o'er uninhabitable Downs Place Elephants for want of Towns
As learnèd commentators view In Homer more than Homer knew.
Undoubtedly philosophers are in the right, when they tell us that nothing is great or little otherwise than by comparison.
Based on Gulliver's descriptions of their behaviour, the King describes Europeans as "the most pernicious race of little odious vermin that nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth.
There's none so blind as they that won't see.
Truth shines the brighter clad in verse.
Books, like men their authors, have no more than one way of coming into the world, but there are ten thousand to go out of it, and return no more.
For they have no conception how a rational creature can be compelled, but only advised, or exhorted; because no person can disobey reason, without giving up his claim to be a rational creature.
How vain an attempt it is for a man to endeavour to do himself honour among those who are out of all degree of equality or comparison with him.
Readers may be divided into three classes - the superficial, the ignorant, and the learned, and I have with much felicity fitted my pen to the genius and advantage of each.
But he may please to consider, that the caprices of womankind are not limited by any climate or nation; and that they are much more uniform than can be easily imagined.
It is the folly of too many to mistake the echo of a London coffee-house for the voice of the kingdom.
May you live all the days of your life.
Many hundred large volumes have been published upon this controversy: but the books of the Big-endians have been long forbidden, and the whole party rendered incapable by law of holding employments.
So that, upon the whole, there must be some kind of subjection due from every man to every man, which cannot be made void by any power, pre-eminence, or authority whatsoever.
Satire is a sort of glass wherein beholders do generally discover everybody’s face but their own.
Besides, I now considered myself as bound by the laws of hospitality, to a people who had treated me with so much expense and magnificence.
Their education is of little consequence to the public; but the old and diseased among them are supported by hospitals: for begging is a trade unknown in this Empire
Let that be as it will, thus much is certain, that, however spiritual intrigues begin, they generally conclude like all others; they may branch upward toward heaven, but the root is in the earth.
Caesar freely confessed to me, that the greatest actions of his own life were not equal, by many degrees, to the glory of taking it away.
Leagues, till we were able to work no longer, being already spent with labour while we were in the ship.
A wise man is never less alone than when he is alone.
Swift has sailed into his rest; Savage indignation there Cannot lacerate his Breast. Imitate him if you dare, World-Besotted Traveler; he Served human liberty.
