The power of fortune is confessed only by the miserable, for the happy impute all their success to prudence or merit.
Author
Jonathan Swift
28 quotations
About Jonathan Swift
Jonathan Swift was an Anglo-Irish writer, essayist, satirist, and Anglican cleric. He was the author of the satirical prose novel Gulliver's Travels (1726) and the creator of the fictional island of Lilliput. He is regarded by many as the greatest satirist of the Georgian era and one of the foremost prose authors in the history of English and world literature.
Read on Wikipedia → Find books by Jonathan SwiftAlthough men are accused of not knowing their own weakness, yet perhaps few know their own strength. It is in men as in soils, where sometimes there is a vein of gold which the owner knows not of.
I never saw, heard, nor read, that the clergy were beloved in any nation where Christianity was the religion of the country. Nothing can render them popular, but some degree of persecution.
We have enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love one another.
The power of fortune is confessed only by the miserable, for the happy impute all their success to prudence or merit.
Power is no blessing in itself, except when it is used to protect the innocent.
Politics, as the word is commonly understood, are nothing but corruptions.
Where there are large powers with little ambition... nature may be said to have fallen short of her purposes.
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I never knew a man come to greatness or eminence who lay abed late in the morning.
A wise person should have money in their head, but not in their heart.
A wise man should have money in his head, but not in his heart.
May you live all the days of your life.
Words are but wind and learning is nothing but words ergo, learning is nothing but wind.
When a true genius appears, you can know him by this sign: that all the dunces are in a confederacy against him.
Men are happy to be laughed at for their humor, but not for their folly.
For in reason, all government without the consent of the governed is the very definition of slavery.
He was a bold man that first ate an oyster.
No man was ever so completely skilled in the conduct of life, as not to receive new information from age and experience.
The best doctors in the world are Doctor Diet, Doctor Quiet, and Doctor Merryman.
It is impossible that anything so natural, so necessary, and so universal as death, should ever have been designed by providence as an evil to mankind.
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.
The best doctors in the world are Doctor Diet, Doctor Quiet, and Doctor Merryman.
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.
Vision is the art of seeing what is invisible to others.
Under this window in stormy weather I marry this man and woman together Let none but Him who rules the thunder Put this man and woman asunder.