Jonathan Swift: Man

Jonathan Swift was Anglo-Irish satirist, essayist, and poet. Explore interesting quotes on man.

Jonathan Swift: 282 quotes6 likes

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

Jonathan Swift book Les Voyages de Gulliver

Thoughts on Various Subjects from Miscellanies (1711-1726)
Variant: All would live long, but none would be old.
Source: Gulliver's Travels

“Reasoning will never make a man correct an ill opinion, which by reasoning he never acquired…”

Letter to a Young Clergyman (January 9, 1720), on proving Christianity to unbelievers

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

Polite Conversation (1738), Dialogue 2

“No wise man ever wished to be younger.”

Thoughts on Various Subjects from Miscellanies (1711-1726)

“If a man makes me keep my distance, the comfort is, he keeps his at the same time.”

“The latter part of a wise man’s life is taken up in curing the follies, prejudices, and false opinions he had contracted in the former.”

Thoughts on Various Subjects from Miscellanies (1711-1726)

“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.”

Jonathan Swift book Les Voyages de Gulliver

Source: Gulliver's Travels

“There is, indeed, no wild beast more to be dreaded than a communicative man having nothing to communicate.”

Christian Nestell Bovee, in Intuitions and Summaries of Thought (1862), Volume I, p. 124
Misattributed

“Censure is the tax a man pays to the public for being eminent.”

Thoughts on Various Subjects from Miscellanies (1711-1726)

“For, in reason, all government without the consent of the governed is the very definition of slavery: but in fact, eleven men well armed will certainly subdue one single man in his shirt.”

The Drapier's Letters, letter iv (13 October, 1724)

“The two maxims of any great man at court are always to keep his countenance and never to keep his word.”

http://books.google.com/books?id=eRwwAAAAMAAJ&q="The+two+maxims+of+any+great+man+at+court+are+always+to+keep+his+countenance+and+never+to+keep+his+word"&pg=PA262#v=onepage
Thoughts on Various Subjects from Miscellanies (1711-1726)

“A nice man is a man of nasty ideas.”

Thoughts on Various Subjects from Miscellanies (1711-1726)

“When I behold this I sighed, and said within myself, "Surely mortal man is a broomstick!" Nature sent him into the world strong and lusty, in a thriving condition, wearing his own hair on his head, the proper branches of this reasoning vegetable, till the axe of intemperance has lopped off his green boughs, and left him a withered trunk; he then flies to art, and puts on a periwig, valuing himself upon an unnatural bundle of hairs, all covered with powder, that never grew on his head; but now should this our broomstick pretend to enter the scene, proud of those birchen spoils it never bore, and all covered with dust, through the sweepings of the finest lady's chamber, we should be apt to ridicule and despise its vanity. Partial judges that we are of our own excellencies, and other men's defaults!”

Meditation on a Broomstick (1703–1710)