Jonathan Swift

“He was a fiddler, and consequently a rogue.”

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

“Don't set your wit against a child.”

“Promises and pie-crust are made to be broken.”

“Where I am not understood, it shall be concluded that something very useful and profound is couched underneath.”

“I have one word to say upon the subject of profound writers, who are grown very numerous of late; and I know very well the judicious world is resolved to list me in that number. I conceive therefore, as to the business of being profound, that it is with writers as with wells; a person with good eyes may see to the bottom of the deepest, provided any water be there; and often, when there is nothing in the world at the bottom, besides dryness and dirt, though it be but a yard and half under ground, it shall pass however for wondrous deep, upon no wiser a reason than because it is wondrous dark.”

“There is nothing constant in this world but inconsistency.”

“There were many times my pants were so thin I could sit on a dime and tell if it was heads or tails.”

“He was a bold man that first ate an oyster.”

“What they do in heaven we are ignorant of; what they do not do we are told expressly.”

“Men are happy to be laughed at for their humor, but not for their folly.”

“Positiveness is a good quality for preachers and speakers because, whoever shares his thoughts with the public will convince them as he himself appears convinced.”

“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.”

“Principally I hate and detest that animal called man; although I heartily love John, Peter, Thomas, and so forth.”

“The want of belief is a defect that ought to be concealed when it cannot be overcome.”

“It is in men as in soils where sometimes there is a vein of gold which the owner knows not.”

“כשגאון גדול מופיע בעולם, כל הטיפשים כורתים ברית נגדו.”

“כשאנו משתוקקים או שואפים למשהו, אנו מתעכבים במחשבותינו על היתרונות שלו; כשיש לנו אותו, אנו מתעכבים רק על הרעות שלו.”

“המכנה אדם כפוי טובה כולל בכינויו זה את כל החטאים שאדם יכול להיות אשם בהם.”

“אנשים מעריצים את הזקנים ואת כוכבי השביט בגלל אותה סיבה: זקניהם הארוכים והתיימרותם לנבא את העתיד.”